INVINCIBLE 

TD  TCIJ    It 


J.  C  .WALSH 


THE  INVINCIBLE   IRISH 


The  Invincible  Irish 


BY 

J.  C.  WALSH 

7  met  with  Nap  per  Tandy 
And  he  took  me  by  the  hand' 


NEW  YORK 
THE  DEVIN-ADAIR  CO. 


Copyright,  1919,  by 
THE   DEVIN-ADAIR   CO. 


JUAHfc 
\iT3 


239753 


BOSTON  COLLEGE  LIBRARY 
CHESTNUT  HILL.  MASS. 


REV.  RICHARD  H.  TIERNEY 

WHOSE     NAME     IS     HONORED 

IN  ERIN 


CONTENTS 

I.     Independence  or  Re-conquest.  9 

II.     "I  Met  with  Napper  Tandy" .  25 

III.  Ireland  under  the  Microscope  35 

IV.  The  Men  of  Clare 62 

V.     The  Policy  of  Self  Reliance.  .  85 

VI.     Forcing  Frames  of  Freedom.  107 

VII.     Whitecaps  on  a  Rising  Sea. .  .  123 

VIII.    The  Irish  Valiant  Woman.  . .  140 

IX.    What  Can  Be  Done  to  Help. .  153 

APPENDIX 

Ireland's  Right  to  Freedom 169 


INDEPENDENCE  OR 
RE-CONQUEST 

ONE  day,  early  in  February,  in  the  win- 
ter garden  of  the  Grand  Hotel  in 
Paris,  I  ran  across  an  American  business 
man  who  had  come  to  Europe  after  the  ar- 
mistice to  see  for  himself  what  were  the 
possibilities  for  American  trade.  "I  see," 
he  remarked,  "that  over  in  Ireland  they 
have  declared  a  republic,  and  got  away 
with  it."  I  knew  that  the  Irish  members 
who  had  been  elected,  in  the  previous  De- 
cember, with  the  declared  intention  of  stay- 
ing away  from  London,  had  held  a  meeting 
in  the  Dublin  Mansion  House,  but  the  Paris 
newspapers  were  very  careful,  all  through 
the  Peace  Conference,  about  what  news 
from  Ireland  they  published,  for  the  Paris 

[9] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

press  was  under  a  very  firm  control  by  the 
French  Government,  and  in  those  days  of 
delicate  manipulation  it  was  thought  to  be 
very  bad  policy  to  print  anything  which 
might  be  disagreeable  to  England;  on  all 
that  pertained  to  Ireland,  one  very  able 
Frenchman  commented  to  me,  "our  English 
friends  are  extraordinarily  sensitive." 
Therefore,  while  I  knew  that  the  Dail 
Eireann  had  been  set  up,  that  an  appeal  to 
the  world  had  been  issued,  that  delegates 
to  the  Peace  Conference  had  been  named, 
that  a  Republic  had  been  proclaimed  and  a 
President  had  been  elected,  it  remained  true 
that  the  newspapers  had  presented  the  news 
in  such  a  way  as  to  suggest  that  the  new  or- 
ganization had  but  a  very  tenuous  hold 
upon  existence,  and  what  now  caught  my 
attention  was  the  comment  of  this  shrewd 
American  that  they  had  "got  away  with  it." 
When  one  came  to  think  of  it,  the  fact  that 
[10] 


Independence  or  Re-conquest 

all  this  had  been  done  did  seem  to  be  in- 
vested with  significance,  for  had  not  other 
men,  not  three  years  earlier,  signed  their 
names  to  a  republican  proclamation,  and 
were  not  the  bodies  of  all  of  them  committed 
to  the  destroying  quicklime? 

Afterwards  I  heard  more  of  this  meeting. 
It  came  about  naturally  enough,  and  even 
for  the  success  with  which  the  participants 
"got  away  with  it"  there  was  an  adequate 
explanation. 

When  the  British  Cabinet  decided  that  a 
general  election  should  be  held  between  the 
signing  of  the  armistice  and  the  opening  of 
the  Peace  Conference,  public  opinion  in 
England  directed  itself  to  one  set  of  facts, 
public  opinion  in  Ireland  to  another  set 
altogether.  Mr.  Lloyd  George  offered  to 
the  English  people  a  pretentious  pro- 
gramme of  reform.  The  people  refused  to 
pay  any  attention.    What  they  were  inter- 

[ii] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

ested  in  was  that  Germany  must  be  made  to 
pay  and  that  the  Kaiser  must  be  hanged. 
Mr.  Lloyd  George  dropped  his  election 
programme  and  was  satisfied  to  take  his 
majority  on  the  terms  upon  which  it  was 
offered. 

In  Ireland,  instead  of  looking  eastward 
towards  Germany,  they  preferred  to  look 
westward  towards  America.  They  saw  in 
the  fourteen  points  of  President  Wilson  the 
assurance  that  every  European  nationality 
was  to  escape  from  subjection,  and  they 
acted  accordingly.  The  election  was  held 
on  the  single  issue  of  the  assertion  of  Ire- 
land's freedom,  and  the  election  posters 
were  a  faithful  paraphrase  of  President 
Wilson's  utterances.  It  was  amazing,  no 
doubt,  that  such  things  could  be,  but  it  was 
so,  and  when  the  fact  was  realized  the  re- 
sponse was  overwhelming.  As  an  index  of 
the  situation,  it  may  be  stated  that  Arch- 

[12] 


Independence  or  Re-conquest 

bishop  Walsh  of  Dublin,  who,  since  his 
episcopal  consecration,  had  felt  it  to  be  his 
duty  to  abstain  from  voting,  concluded  that 
since  the  impossible  had  happened,  and 
since  it  was  now  practicable,  in  the  most 
regular  way,  to  signify  his  desire  for  the 
political  independence  of  his  country,  with 
no  room  for  misunderstanding  what  the 
vote  would  mean,  there  was  nothing  for  it 
but  to  cast  his  ballot  in  the  company  of  the 
rest  of  his  countrymen.  It  can  never  be 
argued,  therefore,  that  Ireland  had  left  her- 
self exposed  to  the  chance  that  the  Peace 
Conference  might  decide  in  ignorance  of 
her  wishes. 

It  was  inevitable  that  the  men  who  were 
elected,  in  these  circumstances,  to  stay  at 
home  in  Ireland,  should  meet  and  give 
effect  to  the  declaration  which  Ireland 
had  thus  most  solemnly  made.  This  they 
did,  on  January  21,  or  rather  those  of  them 
[13] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

did  who  were  not  still  in  prison.  A  fact 
of  the  first  consequence  is  that  they  were 
permitted  to  meet  and  to  declare  their  pur- 
poses. Dublin  Castle  did  consider  prevent- 
ing the  meeting,  and  it  is  said  the  decision 
not  to  interfere  was  taken  on  the  narrowest 
margin.  On  the  other  hand,  I  have  been 
credibly  informed  that  the  meeting  would 
have  been  held,  even  if  it  had  been  forbid- 
den, if  not  at  the  Mansion  House  then  else- 
where, and  that  the  necessary  dispositions 
to  prevent  interruption  of  the  meeting  by 
force  had  been  effected. 

There  is  no  disguising  that  both  the  elec- 
tion and  the  meeting  at  which  the  Republic 
was  proclaimed  were  held  behind  the 
breastwork  of  Wilsonian  prestige.  The  im- 
portance of  America  in  the  negotiations  for 
peace  also  helped.  In  none  of  the  Euro- 
pean chancelleries,  at  that  moment,  was 
it  thought  expedient  to  risk  Mr.  Wilson's 


Independence  or  Re-conquest 

disfavor  or  to  do  anything  to  invite 
American  hostility.  When  Mr.  Wilson 
came  to  London,  on  Boxing  Day,  one  could 
feel  it  in  the  air  that  people  were  undecided 
whether  it  was  a  friend  or  an  enemy  who 
was  at  hand.  Could  it  possibly  be  a  friend 
who  so  inconsiderately  interfered  with  the 
sacred  custom  of  spending  the  Christmas 
holidays  in  the  country?  For  a  whole  week 
the  newspapers  labored  to  overcome  this 
impression  by  printing  columns  of  the  most 
fulsome  adulation  of  Mr.  Wilson  from  their 
Paris  correspondents,  something  which 
shocked  the  English  sense  of  dignity  to 
the  core,  but  which  attained  its  end,  for 
the  reception  to  him  when  he  came  was  not 
unworthy  of  London's  reputation  for  street 
spectacles.  When  he  went  away  again  the 
impression  had  got  abroad  that,  if  his  favor 
had  not  been  secured  for  all  England's  de- 
mands, at  least  his  measure  had  been  taken. 
[15] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

Long  afterwards,  in  Paris,  Mr.  Wilson  was 
reported  as  having  said  to  an  intimate  that 
he  did  think  an  understanding  had  been  ef- 
fected, only  to  find  that,  when  the  time  came 
for  Mr.  George  and  Mr.  Balfour  to  sup- 
port him,  somehow  the  realization  of  his 
desires  had  been  made  impossible.  The 
story  may  be  true ;  at  least  it  epitomizes  the 
failure  of  the  Peace  Conference  insofar  as, 
in  the  American  view,  the  Conference 
failed.  But  in  December,  when  the  elec- 
tions were  held,  and  in  January,  when  the 
meeting  of  Dail  Eireann  was  held,  and  for 
some  time  after,  it  was  one  of  the  highest 
concerns  of  English  policy  not  to  allow  Mr. 
Wilson's  mind  to  be  disturbed.  Hardly 
anything  less  could  have  operated  to  induce 
Dublin  Castle  to  hold  its  hand.  Unless  I 
mistake,  we  shall  learn  sometime  that  mem- 
bers of  the  American  Peace  Delegation, 
perhaps  even  the  highest  of  them,  knew 
[16] 


Independence  or  Re-conquest 

what  the  Irish  were  going  to  do.  I  don't 
say  they  inspired,  but  I  think  they  knew. 
Sometimes  I  even  think  my  friend  who  was 
impressed  by  the  fact  that  the  Irish  had 
"got  away  with  it,"  may  have  reflected  the 
mental  attitude  of  some  of  those  at  the  Cril- 
lon  Hotel  whose  devotion  to  Mr.  Wilson's 
ideals  was  at  the  time  unclouded  by  the  dis- 
appointment which  long  afterwards  drove 
them  home  in  despair. 

Still,  at  the  Conference  itself,  Ireland's 
case  did  not  make  headway  in  official  favor. 
Mr.  O'Kelly,  duly  accredited,  came  over 
and  formally  presented,  through  the  post 
office,  his  country's  case.  He  got  very  few 
acknowledgments  and  no  attention.  Lest 
"the  susceptibilities  of  our  English  friends" 
should  be  wounded,  Ireland  was  taboo  in 
Paris.  For  a  long  time  the  argument  was 
advanced  that  Ireland  could  not  hope  to 
get  the  Conference's  attention,  as  the  sole 
[17] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

business  in  Paris  was  to  liquidate  the  affairs 
of  the  defeated  Empires.  Even  to  this  there 
were  limits,  for  when  it  came  to  Turkey's 
turn  to  be  divided  there  was  a  sudden  up- 
flaming  of  Mahometan  anger,  and  the  Ma- 
harajah of  Bekanir  rushed  back  to  Paris 
with  a  warning  to  go  slow.  Perhaps  we 
shall  learn,  all  in  good  time,  that  the  trouble 
in  India  smoothed  the  way  for  the  success 
of  Japan  in  the  matter  of  Shantung. 

Ireland's  turn  came,  as  eve^body  who 
had  followed  the  League  of  Nations  discus- 
sion saw  it  must  come,  with  the  appearance 
of  Article  X  of  the  first  draft  of  the  League 
Covenant.  No  doubt  the  original  purpose 
of  that  article  was  to  ensure  to  the  small 
nations  being  called  into  existence  in  East- 
ern Europe  that  they  were  to  be  born  viable 
and  were  not  predestined  for  enumeration 
in  the  infant  mortality  returns.  The  lan- 
guage of  the  article,  however,  plainly  ex- 
[18] 


Independence  or  Re-conquest 

tends  the  guarantee  of  territorial  integrity 
to  the  possessions  of  the  victorious  powers. 
Its  effect  upon  Ireland  was,  according  to 
the  general  interpretation,  to  confirm  Eng- 
land's title  thereto.  As  one  jurist  com- 
mented, it  adjudged  that  this  and  all  such 
titles  were  sound,  always  had  been  and  al- 
ways would  be,  and  did  so  without  exami- 
nation or  hearing  of  adverse  claim. 

At  this  point  appeared  the  importance  of 
the  action  of  Ireland  in  declaring  its  inde- 
pendence in  December  and  January.  The 
Conference  might  ignore  Ireland,  might  set 
up  every  other  European  nationality  as  a 
separate  state  and  leave  Ireland  out,  but 
it  could  not  change  the  fact  that  Ireland, 
by  her  own  act,  and  without  waiting  for 
favors,  had  completed  the  Conference's 
work.  Mr.  O'Kelly  and  his  colleague,  Mr. 
George  Gavan  Duffy,  issued  to  the  mem- 
bers of  the  Conference  a  forceful  remon- 
[19] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

strance  against  Article  X  and  against  the 
acceptance  of  the  peace  terms  for  Ireland 
by  any  but  the  duly  authorized  representa- 
tives of  the  Irish  Government. 

Into  this  situation  came  the  delegates  of 
the  American  Committee  on  Irish  Inde- 
pendence, Mr.  Frank  P.  Walsh,  ex-Gover- 
nor Dunne,  and  Mr.  M.  J.  Ryan.  Their 
work,  and  they  were  very  active,  rested 
upon  the  assumption  that  Ireland,  which 
had  declared  her  independence,  had  the 
right  to  do  so  and  to  have  her  action  recog- 
nized and  confirmed;  from  which  it  fol- 
lowed that  Article  X,  or  any  other  article 
in  the  League  of  Nations  Covenant,  or  the 
Covenant  itself,  if  designed  to  reverse  the 
decision  of  the  Irish  people,  or  if  likely  to 
be  operative  in  the  sense  of  depriving  Ire- 
land of  her  formally  affirmed  independence, 
was  to  be  condemned  and  resisted.  In  Amer- 
ica, condemnation  had  already  found  voice. 
[20] 


Independence  or  Re-conquest 

They  had  access  to  President  Wilson  and 
to  the  American  Peace  Delegation,  and  were 
therefore  in  position  to  do  for  Mr.  O'Kelly 
and  Mr.  Duffy  what  these  gentlemen 
found  great  difficulty  in  doing  for  them- 
selves, namely,  to  establish  personal  contact 
with  one  of  the  delegations  engaged  in  the 
work  of  the  Conference.  The  Irish-Ameri- 
can Delegation,  in  fact,  upset  all  the  con- 
ventions that  had  been  arranged  with  great 
care  for  visitors  such  as  they.  All  other 
such  delegations  were,  if  lucky,  received; 
then  they  were  forgotten;  then,  unless  pre- 
vented, they  went  home.  The  process  was 
started  in  the  orthodox  manner  with  Mr. 
Walsh  and  his  colleagues.  Mr.  Walsh  saw 
the  President.  They  all  saw  other  members 
of  the  American  Delegation,  some  of  whom 
evidenced  a  very  proper  sense  of  the  utility 
of  being  nice  to  men  of  notable  political 
importance  at  home.  Mr.  Lloyd  George, 
[21] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

having  been  informed  by  a  most  capable  sec- 
retary how  things  were  heading,  expressed 
a  desire  for  an  interview;  then,  realizing 
the  danger  he  was  running,  he  kept  putting 
it  off,  while  friends  of  his,  fearful  of  the 
consequences  of  such  levity,  sought  the 
means  of  cancelling  the  appointment.  Be- 
fore an  opening  appeared  the  delegates  an- 
nounced their  desire  to  go  to  Ireland.  Their 
action  there  gave  Mr.  George  his  chance 
to  escape,  but  it  did  more.  It  gave  Ireland 
the  limelight,  with  two  continents  looking 
on,  for  two  weeks.  It  gave  the  people  of 
Ireland  an  opportunity  for  self-expression, 
and  they  took  it,  took  it  to  the  full.  When 
the  delegates  returned  to  Paris,  their  field 
of  action  had  been  expanded.  Never  for 
a  day  were  they  victims  of  neglect,  as  the 
other  lesser  delegations  were.  And  when 
at  last  they  returned  to  America,  to  renew 
the  struggle  there,  they  left  in  Paris  a  bu- 
[22] 


Independence  or  Re-conquest 

reau  for  the  continuation  of  the  European 
phases  of  the  work. 

When  they  came  back  to  Paris,  I  went 
to  Ireland.  The  treaty  with  Germany  was 
ready  for  signature,  the  hotels  which  housed 
the  delegations  were  emptying,  the  corre- 
spondents were  homeward  bound,  and  I  de- 
cided to  spend  some  time  in  Ireland,  to  see 
and  hear  for  myself.  When  I  got  home  to 
New  York,  I  found  myself  saying,  at  a  meet- 
ing I  attended,  that  I  knew  what  Free  Ire- 
land was,  for  I  had  been  there;  that  if  Ire- 
land was  not  free,  then  we  had  to  inquire 
into  the  dwelling-place  of  freedom,  for  if 
freedom  has  its  seat  in  the  hearts  of  men 
and  women,  Ireland  was  free;  and  that 
change,  if  change  there  was  to  be,  must  con- 
sist in  taking  from  them  something  they 
have,  rather  than  in  giving  them  something 
they  have  not.  I  know  the  English  army 
is  there,  but  that  does  not  affect  the  argu- 
[23] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

merit.  Its  presence  will  only  alter  the  sit- 
uation if  England  decides  upon  a  re-con- 
quest of  Ireland,  and  if  that  enterprise  is 
carried  to  success  with  the  world  looking 
on.  There  is  a  government  in  Ireland  sup- 
ported and  sustained  by  the  people.  There 
is  an  army  in  Ireland  whose  mission  it  is 
to  hold  the  island  for  a  foreign  power.  How 
long  will  the  condition  last,  and  which  way 
will  it  end?  It  seems  an  absurd  question 
after  what  the  world  has  just  been  through. 


[24] 


II 

"I  MET  WITH  NAPPER  TANDY" 

THERE  is  a  saying  that  the  Europe  you 
see  is  the  Europe  you  take  with  you 
when  you  go  to  see  it.  I  suppose  that  is 
true  of  Ireland  too.  After  some  conversa- 
tion with  the  American  delegates  on  their 
return  to  Paris  I  was  prepared  to  find  Ire- 
land an  exciting  place  to  visit,  and  I  was 
not  disappointed.  The  hotels  were  closed, 
because  of  a  labor  disagreement,  and  I  was 
fortunate  enough  to  be  accommodated  in  a 
private  house.  I  was  told  on  the  second  day 
not  to  be  surprised  if  the  police  turned  up 
in  my  bedroom  any  hour  of  the  morning, 
as  they  were  rather  given  to  that  sort  of 
thing  and  there  were  rumors  about  that  they 
meant  to  be  more  active  than  usual.  They 
[25] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

didn't  come,  however.  If  they  had,  and 
if  they  had  ordered  me  to  seek  other  quar- 
ters, what  was  I  to  do?  Go  ask  some  kind 
householder  to  take  me  in,  first  requiring 
from  him  a  certificate  that  he  wasn't  the 
sort  of  person  whose  house  might  be 
searched?  Fortunately  it  didn't  come  to 
that.  But  I  lived  in  the  midst  of  alarms. 
Going  into  the  Knights  of  Columbus  Club 
on  Ascension  Thursday  to  ask  for  mail,  I 
saw,  crossing  Baggot  Street,  just  below, 
three  armored  cars.  A  half  hour  later, 
on  Leeson  Street,  three  whippet  tanks 
passed  me  as  fast  as  they  could  go.  Up 
above  an  airplane  was  circling.  I  made  up 
my  mind  that  the  expected  blow  had  fallen, 
or  was  about  to  fall.  Continuing  on  my 
way  to  the  University  Church  on  St.  Ste- 
phen's Green,  whom  should  I  see  but  Mr. 
DeValera,  carrying  his  little  document  bag, 
walking  along  in  quiet  conversation  with 
[26] 


"I  Met  with  Napper  Tandy" 

a  friend  of  his  who  trundled  a  bicycle.  Not 
but  what  there  have  been  a  great  many 
searches.  The  offices  of  the  Irish  Repub- 
lic, at  6  Harcourt  Street,  a  house  Cardinal 
Newman  once  used  as  a  residence,  are 
searched  quite  frequently  and  very  thor- 
oughly. Mr.  Griffith  says  they  don't  mind 
any  more,  which  shows  one  can  get  used 
to  anything.  Of  course  it  rather  interferes 
with  the  careful  filing  of  official  records  to 
have  the  whole  stock  removed  at  irregular 
intervals,  but  the  proceeding  must  be  an 
excellent  check  upon  the  tendency  to  red 
tape  which  limits  the  efficiency  of  most  gov- 
ernment offices.  Nobody  seems  to  think 
this  one  is  inefficient. 

There  were  questions  about  the  Ireland 
I  brought  with  me  from  Paris  which  seemed 
to  me  to  be  in  more  urgent  need  of  answer 
than  this  daily  and  nightly  one  concerning 
the  police.  They  all  harked  back,  in  the 
[27] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

main,  to  the  expression  of  my  friend  whose 
real  interest  was  in  the  fact  that  they  "got 
away  with  it."  Could  they  really  hope  to 
go  on  doing  so?  If  they  could,  upon  what 
were  their  expectations  based?  I  had  a  lot 
of  queries  all  ready  to  put  when  I  ar- 
rived in  Dublin,  all  running  to  the  famous 
one  of  Napper  Tandy,  "How  is  poor  old  Ire- 
land, and  how  does  she  stand?"  Had  they 
started  something  they  could  not  finish? 
What  was  the  measure  of  the  resources 
upon  which  they  could  depend  if  they  were 
in  for  a  long  period,  say,  of  passive  resist- 
ance? Could  they  see  light  in  the  direc- 
tion of  Ulster?  How  far  could  they  ex- 
pect to  get  in  the  working  out  of  any  plans 
they  might  make  for  the  development  of 
Ireland  with  Dublin  Castle  still  in  posses- 
sion of  the  purse?  Was  the  national  spirit 
strong  enough,  and  disciplined  enough,  to 
raise  any  considerable  doubt  in  London 
[28] 


"I  Met  with  Napper  Tandy" 

as  to  what  might  be  gained  by  turning 
loose  the  soldiery?  What  addition  to  the 
national  staying  power,  if  any,  had  resulted 
from  the  recent  increase  of  facilities  for 
university  education?  Could  the  country 
hold  its  population,  and  not  be  thrown  back 
into  the  old  round  under  which  the  young 
men  and  women  went  to  America  as  soon 
as  they  were  grown?  What  was  the  condi- 
tion of  existing  industries,  and  what  the 
prospect  for  new  ones?  What  increase  of 
sustaining  strength  had  resulted  from  ob- 
taining possession  of  the  land?  What  had 
been  done  about  labor,  and  was  the  incidence 
of  the  labor  problem  likely  to  make  for  na- 
tional strength  or  for  weakness?  What  were 
the  materials  out  of  which  it  could  be  hoped 
that  a  direct  foreign  trade  might  be  built 
up  with  other  countries  than  England? 
Were  there,  in  short,  the  elements  required 
to  organize  a  state,  even  supposing  the  men- 
[29] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

ace  of  a  hostile  army  of  occupation  to  be 
withdrawn?  Or  to  carry  on  supposing  it 
not  to  be  withdrawn?  Had  Ireland  ad- 
vanced far  enough  from  its  old  position  as 
"the  most  distressful  country"  to  warrant 
the  assumption  that  it  could  function  as  a 
nation  unless  prevented  from  so  doing  by 
measures  of  military  repression?  Part  of 
the  new  world  policy  incorporated  in  the 
treaty  of  peace  which  assumes  to  make  over 
the  world,  rests  upon  recognition  that  there 
are  peoples  who  have  to  undergo  an  ap- 
prenticeship, under  a  master  more  or  less 
disinterested,  before  they  are  fitted  for  free- 
dom, which,  however,  they  are  then  to  have. 
Is  Ireland  in  that  class,  or  has  she  passed 
out  of  it? 

She  has  passed  out  of  it.    Her  people  are 

fit  for  freedom  and  ready  for  it.  If  she  is  not 

to  be  admitted  to  a  league  of  free  nations, 

the  fault  is  not  hers.    If  she  is  admitted  she 

[30] 


"I  Met  with  Napper  Tandy" 

is  well  able  to  discharge  all  the  obligations 
that  will  devolve  upon  her. 

That  is  why  the  leaders  take  the  stand 
they  do  in  regard  to  the  treaties  of  peace. 
They  think  Ireland  better  prepared  for 
freedom  than  most  of  the  nations  to  which 
freedom  has  been  given,  and  as  well  pre- 
pared as  some  that  had  it  before.  They  do 
not  accept  the  interested  silence  of  Paris 
as  an  answer  with  which  they  can  or  will 
be  satisfied. 

They  are  not  dismayed  by  the  Ulster  dif- 
ficulty. They  regard  Ulster  as  part  of  Ire- 
land, refuse  to  think  of  it  as  anything  else, 
and  look  forward  to  the  adjustment  of  dif- 
ferences of  any  sort,  within  Ireland,  with 
no  greater  strain  upon  the  resources  of  con- 
ciliatory statesmanship  than  is  involved  in 
any  other  country  where  such  differences 
arise.  The  only  Ulster  that  gives  them 
worry  is  an  Ulster  used  by  England  to  di- 
[31] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

vide  Ireland  so  that  England  may  rule  all 
and  Ireland  be  prevented  from  controlling 
the  peaceful  ordering  of  its  own  life. 

As  to  England,  they  have  but  one  word : 
"We  are  ready  to  be  friends  with  her  on  the 
single  condition  that  she  takes  herself  out 
of  our  house."  The  idea  that  England 
would  have  in  a  free  Ireland  an  enemy 
neighbor  commands  no  support  in  Ireland 
itself. 

They  are  stronger  than  they  were  when 
O'Connell  led  them,  stronger  and  wealthier, 
because  they  have  the  land  and  its  earnings, 
than  when  Davitt  and  Parnell  began  the 
thirty  years  of  struggle  to  get  rid  of  the 
landords  who  kept  them  impoverished  in 
purse  and  timorous  in  spirit. 

They  have  built  up  industries,  although 
prevented  from  giving  fiscal  or  other  gov- 
ernmental help,  by  cultivating  the  Irish  na- 
tional spirit  under  the  inspiration  of  the  old 
[32] 


"I  Met  with  Napper  Tandy" 

Irish  language,  to  the  point  where  sentiment 
is  almost  as  effective  as  a  tariff. 

Whereas,  under  the  old  penal  dispensa- 
tion and  its  survivals,  the  priest  was  almost 
the  only  leader  of  trained  intelligence,  there 
is  now  a  large  and  ever-increasing  univer- 
sity class,  so  large  as  to  bear  the  burden  the 
priest  formerly  had  to  bear  alone,  and  to 
permit  of  his  returning,  to  his  great  joy, 
to  the  single  sphere  to  which  his  vocation 
called  him. 

In  their  present  temper,  and  with  the  ca- 
pacity they  have  attained,  it  would  be  an 
extremely  difficult  thing  to  govern  the  Irish 
people  with  the  naked  sword. 

The  value  of  Ireland's  material  resources 
is  known;  their  fullest  use  awaits  only  the 
control  of  legislation  which  any  national 
government  should  have,  and  which  in  this 
instance  is  forcibly  withheld. 

There  are  commodities  for  export,  and 
[33] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

will  soon  be  more.  There  are  demands  for 
imports  which  would  help  sustain  an 
American  shipping  venture,  and  a  French. 

The  life  of  Ireland  can  be  organized,  its 
energies  can  be  directed,  through  many 
agencies  that  can  escape  the  control  of  Dub- 
lin Castle;  but  Ireland,  even  if  her  life  can- 
not be  effectively  controlled  by  agents  of  a 
foreign  country  or  by  a  foreign  military 
force,  is  entitled  to  the  freedom  of  move- 
ment which  all  other  nations  enjoy.  Even 
where  there  is  that  freedom,  the  struggle 
for  sound  social  existence  is  severe  enough. 
Why  should  one  white  nation  be  handi- 
capped as  against  all  the  others? 

England  may  not  want  to  withdraw  from 
Ireland,  but  neither  did  Spain  want  to  with- 
draw from  Holland,  or  Germany  from  Bel- 
gium, or  Russia  from  Poland.  Yet  they  did, 
and  at  bottom  it  was  because  the  people 
they  sought  to  rule  refused  to  forego  their 
right  to  be  free. 

[34] 


Ill 

IRELAND  UNDER  THE 
iMICROSCOPE 

"T  SOMETIMES  think,"  commented  my 
A  hostess,  who  has  greatly  served  Ire- 
land, and  whose  father  was  an  Irish  clergy- 
man, "that  those  whose  main  thought  is  of 
the  next  world  may  lack  something  of  the 
temperament  that  is  needed  for  a  time  like 
this."  "So  you  would  have  it,"  I  ventured, 
"Seek  ye  first  the  Republic  of  Ireland  and 
all  else  shall  be  added  unto  you."  "For 
my  part,"  broke  in  a  member  of  the  So- 
ciety of  Friends,  "I  am  convinced  that  the 
Kingdom  of  Heaven  and  the  Republic  of 
Ireland  are  not  so  far  apart  in  the  souls 
of  the  people  hereabouts."  "That  is  true, 
[35] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

indeed.  When  Professor  M.  was  here  last 
he  said  to  me :  'When  I  left  you  the  other 
day  it  was  with  the  feeling  that  I  might 
never  see  you  again.  Before  I  went  home 
I  had  all  my  affairs  settled,  for  this  world 
and  for  the  next.  DeValera  was  to  come 
next  day,  processions  had  been  forbidden, 
and  there  were  all  sorts  of  probabilities  that 
many  of  us  would  be  killed.'  Another  friend 
told  me  that  on  that  morning  the  churches 
were  filled  with  young  men  receiving  Com- 
munion, all  of  them  looking  quite  splendid- 
ly happy.  They  tell  me  the  police  watch 
the  churches  now,  and  when  they  see  un- 
usual numbers  going  to  Confession  the  fact 
is  reported  to  the  Castle."  "That  is  what  I 
meant,"  said  the  Quaker,  "by  the  remark 

I  made  a  minute  ago." 

*     *     * 

A  corner  of  Fitzwilliam  Square.    Two 
policemen  and  a  plain-clothes  man  stand- 
[36] 


Ireland  under  the  Microscope 

"ing.  Across  the  street  a  house  at  the  top 
of  which  Mr.  DeValera  has  his  quarters. 
When  the  door  opens  the  police  opposite 
have  a  clear  view  of  the  hall,  if  the  door 
opens  wide  enough.  Two  men  on  bicycles 
come  down  the  street.  One  stops  at  the 
corner  where  the  police  are  and  waits, 
while  the  other  enters  the  house.  Two  more 
of  the  secret-service  men  appear.  The  men 
of  law  take  turns  walking  round  the  man 
standing  motionless  by  his  bicycle.  The 
other  man  comes  out,  both  mount  their  bi- 
cycles and  go  off,  followed  by  another  offi- 
cer on  a  bicycle,  up  to  now  hidden  behind 
the  foliage  in  the  park.  Nothing  happens. 
The  man  who  went  inside  is  M.  C,  member 
of  An  Dail  Eireann,  and  an  official  in  the 
"elected  Government  of  the  Republic."  He 
is  one  of  a  hundred  or  more  men  in  Ireland 
who  are  "on  the  run,"  that  is,  due  to  be  in 
prison,  but  unwilling  to  go.  This  one  is 
[37] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

known  to  be  so  very  unwilling  that  the  po- 
lice do  not  like  to  argue  the  matter.  The 
bicycle  saves  their  faces  when  they  are  in 
numbers  and  on  foot.  The  rider  who  stood 
at  the  corner  is  his  bodyguard. 

A  son  of  the  Lord  Chancellor  told  this 
to  a  friend :  "The  night  the  American  dele- 
gates were  received  by  the  Lord  Mayor, 
one  of  the  guests,  a  doctor,  started  to  cross 
Dawson  Street  towards  the  Mansion  House. 
A  policeman  recognized  him  and  made  a 
movement  to  stop  him.  He  shook  off  the 
detaining  hand  and  went  across  at  a  run. 
Arrived  at  the  other  sidewalk,  he  turned 
back,  came  half  across  the  street,  knocked 
down  a  particularly  offensive  detective  he 
had  imperfectly  recognized  in  transit,  and 
then  walked  quietly  into  the  Mansion 
House."  Ten  days  later  Padraic  Pearse's 
play,  "The  Singer,"  was  being  put  on  at  the 
[38] 


Ireland  under  the  Microscope 

Abbey  Theatre.  A  good  many  in  the  au- 
dience knew  who  was  to  take  the  leading 
part.  He  was  the  principal  in  the  adven- 
ture just  related.  The  performance  was 
for  a  popular  charitable  object,  and  it  would 
be  too  bad  if  anything  happened  to  spoil 
it.  Would  the  actor  come?  Would  he 
come — before  he  was  arrested?    He  came, 

and  the  evening  was  quite  a  success. 

*     *     * 

It  being  half-past  eight,  a  fine  night,  and 
the  sun  still  high  in  the  heavens,  I  decided 
to  keep  a  promise  made  to  Shawn  O'Kelly 
in  Paris  and  went  to  call  on  his  friend,  the 
Lord  Mayor.  Turning  down  Dawson 
Street  from  St.  Stephen's  Green,  I  noticed 
some  policemen,  and  across  the  street  a  score 
or  more  of  boys  and  men.  Mr.  O'Neill  was 
in  the  country,  and  I  made  an  appointment 
for  next  morning.  Turning  north,  I  ran 
into  nine  policemen.  Nine  others  faced 
[39] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

them  from  across  the  way.  Farther  on  were 
eighteen  more.  Then  about  twenty  soldiers, 
with  two  non-commissioned  officers.  Feel- 
ing that  I  must  have  been  doing  something 
wrong  I  stopped  to  inquire,  greatly  daring, 
of  the  officers,  whether  this  was  the  usual 
thing  or  something  special.  The  first  offi- 
cer, whose  conversation  was  inarticulate 
and  void  of  sequence,  gave  me  to  understand 
that  the  soldiers  had  a  grievance :  "We  are 
always  being  turned  out  like  this  on  false 
alarms,  and  when  we  get  here  they  don't 
come.  I  wish  they  would  come."  The 
other,  who,  I  suppose,  was  equally  prepared 
for  "them"  but  less  indignant  over  "their" 
non-appearance,  explained  that  there  was 
to  be  some  sort  of  a  meeting,  he  did  not 
know  about  what,  but  it  had  been  pro- 
claimed by  the  viceroy.  A  policeman  told 
me  that  it  was  something  about  a  protest 
against  Jim  Larkin's  brother  being  kept  in 
[40] 


Ireland  under  the  Microscope 

jail  in  Australia.  It  developed,  later,  that 
the  crafty  Dubliners,  noting  the  show  of 
force,  went  quietly  off  and  held  the  meet- 
ing in  another  place,  without  any  resulting 
convulsion  of  law  and  order,  and  were  just 
dispersing  when  more  police  came  to  in- 
form them  that  the  meeting  must  not  be 
held.  This  gave  me  a  good  conversational 
opening  next  morning,  and  when  I  was 
through,  the  Lord  Mayor  said :  "If  it  wasn't 
that  tragedy  is  always  so  near  the  surface, 
I  declare  there  isn't  a  morning  I  rise  out 
of  my  bed  but  there's  a  laugh  in  it.  Just 
this  minute  before  I  came  to  you,  I  had  an 
application  for  the  use  of  the  round  room 
for  Friday  at  7.30,  and  from  whom,  do  you 
think?  From  the  police  themselves.  And 
for  what?  For  a  strike  meeting.  Here  is  a 
copy  of  their  ballot."  Among  other  things 
it  demands  release  of  the  force  from  mili- 
tary control.  "And  did  you  give  it?"  "I 
[41] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

did."  "And  will  the  meeting  be  pro- 
claimed?" "It  will."  It  was.  A  few 
nights  later  there  was  to  be  a  concert  in  the 
same  hall.  It  was  a  labor  function,  in  honor 
of  James  Connolly's  birthday.  The  women 
were  let  through  the  lines,  the  men  were 
kept  back.  Suddenly  shrieks  were  heard 
and  men  coming  out  of  a  fashionable  club 
found  a  girl  wounded  and  bleeding  on  the 
doorstep.  Three  policemen  were  also 
wounded.  Tragedy  had  come  to  the  sur- 
face. 

*     *     * 

Two  rather  active  young  men  were  en- 
joying a  smoke  when  a  letter  for  one  of 
them  was  handed  in  at  the  door.  (This  was 
not  in  Dublin.)  It  proved  to  contain  a 
plan  of  a  spot  on  the  Kerry  coast  well 
adapted  for  landing  arms,  with  an  accom- 
panying written  description.  "That  looks 
like  a  good  document  to  burn,"  said  one  of 
[42] 


Ireland  under  the  Microscope 

them,  and  they  burned  it.  Half  an  hour 
later  the  house  was  raided  and  searched. 
When  the  incident  was  reported  to  Dublin 
the  comment  was  that  a  better  use  might 
have  been  made  of  the  "planted"  papers, 
and  that  it  was  worth  running  some  risk 
to  keep  such  evidence  where  it  could  be 
used.  I  asked  one  of  the  leaders  what  he 
had  to  say  about  the  poster  found  in  Tip- 
perary  (I  think  it  was)  declaring  forfeit 
the  lives  of  all  in  police  or  military  uni- 
form, which  Lord  Chancellor  Smith  used 
so  effectively  in  the  House  of  Lords.  His 
answer  was,  "Can  you  tell  me  who  printed 
and   posted   it?     It  was   very   handy   for 

Smith,  wasn't  it?" 

*     #     # 

I  met  E —  B —  one  afternoon  at  Arthur 
Griffith's  office,  where  he  described  to  me 
what  was  being  done  in  the  way  of  sub- 
stituting dead-meat  industries   in   Ireland 
[43] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

for  the  shipment  of  cattle  on  the  hoof  to 
England.  Of  that,  more  later.  He  is  a  big, 
lanky,  soft-spoken  Ulsterman,  who,  when 
the  Irish  impulse  caught  him,  went  off  to 
Kerry  to  learn  Irish.  He  came  round  the 
same  evening  to  a  little  soiree,  and  I  man- 
aged to  drag  out  of  him  the  story  of  how, 
under  the  leadership  of  Austin  Stack,  a 
group  of  prisoners  took  possession  of  a  wing 
of  Belfast  jail.  Such  a  gentle,  humorous 
description,  not  a  tinge  of  complaint  or  un- 
kindness.  I  remember  particularly  the  de- 
scription of  how  the  governor,  feeling  that 
he  ought  to  visit  a  part  of  the  prison  beyond 
where  the  men  were,  explained  his  position 
to  Mr.  Stack  and  was  permitted  to  pass  and 
repass  under  a  guard.  B —  has  spent  most 
of  the  last  two  years  in  prison.  This  night 
he  was  complacently  contemplating  spend- 
ing another  couple  of  years  there.  He  had 
gone  to  a  meeting,  where  an  envelope  was 
[44] 


Ireland  under  the  Microscope 

handed  to  him  by  a  local  leader.  He  put  it 
unopened  into  his  pocket.  Presently  the 
platform  was  surrounded,  and  he  was 
searched.  The  inspector  of  police  must 
have  seen  the  letter  handed  to  him,  for  he 
insisted  on  its  being  opened.  Reading  it 
over  the  policeman's  shoulder  B —  realized 
that  there  were  purple  passages  in  it  which 
did  little  credit  to  the  prudence  or  intelli- 
gence of  the  writer,  and  which  probably 
would  mean  prison  for  him.  He  did  not 
complain.  "The  worst  of  it  is,"  said  he, 
"that  my  bicycle  is  being  repaired,  and  I 
won't  have  it  for  a  week."  "Oh,  no  mat- 
ter," was  the  answer,  "mine  is  here,  and 
you  can  take  it  along."  B —  was  one  of  two 
Protestants  in  that  room.  The  other  was 
a  woman.  She,  too,  had  gone  from  the 
North  to  Kerry  for  her  Irish.  Her  hus- 
band is  one  of  those  who  were  kept  long  in 
prison.  She  told  me  quite  calmly  of  the 
[45] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

plans  she  has  made  for  herself  and  the  two 
children  when  her  husband  is  carted  off 
again,  which  is  apt  to  be  soon,  as  he  is  both 
intelligent  and  useful.  I  know  of  four  offers 
made  to  B —  of  quarters  preferable  to  his 
own  in  the  circumstances.  I  wish  it  were 
permissible  to  tell  from  whom  some  of  them 
came.  When  I  last  saw  him  I  tried  my 
tongue  on  one  of  the  two  or  three  bits  of 
colloquial  Irish  to  which  my  ear  had  be- 
come accustomed.  The  vernacular  equiva- 
lent is  something  like  "The  blessing  of  God 

with  vou." 

*     *     * 

Among  those  taken  in  the  net  last  year 
was  a  woman  (her  name  is  known  every- 
where) who  upon  being  liberated  was  or- 
dered not  to  return  to  Ireland.  Her  house 
had  been  let  by  her  friends  to  a  writer  who 
has  interpreted  Ireland,  most  of  the  time 
from  London.  One  morning  a  very  old 
[46] 


Ireland  under  the  Microscope 

woman  rang  the  bell.  The  tenant  pene- 
trated the  disguise,  and  he  was  greatly 
alarmed.  That  just  shows  how  the  London 
outlook  differs  from  the  Dublin  outlook. 
On  the  other  hand,  when  I  asked  a  woman 
who  used  to  spend  most  of  her  year  in  Lon- 
don why  she  had  come  to  Dublin  at  a  time 
like  this,  with  exposure  to  raids  and  seiz- 
ures, her  answer  was  that  life  anywhere  but 
in  Ireland  just  now  would  be  intolerable 
for  her.  When  she  wrote  her  name  in  one 
of  her  books  for  me  she  said,  "This  is  my 
hundred  and  third  birthday,"  which  was 
an  exaggeration,  it  is  true,  but  a  suggestive 
one. 

*     *     $ 

Some  little  girls  in  Killarney  started  out 
one  morning  to  collect  money  for  the  Dail 
Eireann.  They  were  poor  little  girls  and 
Killarney  is  not  a  very  wealthy  town.  The 
police  swooped  down  upon  them  and  they 
[47] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

were  arrested  for  not  having  a  police  per- 
mit. When  they  were  brought  to  trial  they 
refused  to  recognize  the  authority  of  the 
court,  and  would  not  do  any  of  the  things 
the  custom  of  courts  imposes  upon  law- 
abiding  prisoners.  However,  the  sentence 
was  heavy  enough  to  show  the  young  recal- 
citrants they  could  not  terrify  the  British 
Empire  as  represented  by  the  Royal  Irish 
Constabulary.  The  same  happened  to  a 
boy  of  eighteen,  from  near  Cork,  who  was 
confined  in  a  northern  prison.  The  court 
officials  could  not  master  the  intractable 
youngster  enough  to  make  him  conform  to 
the  rules  of  the  court,  and  he  was  still  shout- 
ing his  Republican  faith  when  they  carried 
him  out.  Down  in  Wexford,  moreover, 
when  seven  men  refused  to  recognize  the 
court,  and  those  present  applauded,  the 
magistrate  ordered  the  room  to  be  cleared. 
The  prisoners  went  with  the  rest.  Invited 
[48] 


Ireland  under  the  Microscope 

back,  they  came,  but  still  finding  conditions 
not  to  their  liking  they  put  on  their  hats 
and  went  home.  A  girl  in  the  west  sent 
to  the  member  in  Dublin,  who  showed  it  to 
me,  a  transcription  of  the  order  by  which 
the  general  officer  commanding  the  troops 
cautioned  a  boy  of  sixteen  that  he  must  not 
be  found  in  the  province  of  Connaught  or 
three  named  counties  outside  that  province. 
And  I  saw  another  letter  in  which  a  young 
woman  complained  that  a  large  force  of 
police  and  military  had  entered  the  shop 
kept  by  herself  and  her  sister,  had  removed 
or  disturbed  their  stock-in-trade,  and  for 
explanation  said  only  that  the  sisters  had 
been  warned  long  ago  they  must  stop  their 
seditious  practices.  The  losses  were  stated 
in  very  respectable  figures,  but  the  letter 
was  not  written  in  such  terms  that  any  spirit 

of  repentance  could  be  discerned. 

*     *     * 

[49] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

As  you  go  towards  Limerick  from  Ne- 
nagh  any  young  fellow  in  the  compartment 
will  show  you  the  cottage  upon  the  side  of 
Silvermines  mountain  whence  a  military 
rifle  was  taken  when  the  soldier  was  away. 
The  father  was  killed  in  the  process.  Three 
prisoners  were  taken,  but  the  evidence 
against  them  has  not  been  completed.  On 
the  other  side  of  Limerick,  on  one  of  the 
Clare  roads,  you  come  to  a  workhouse  to 
which  one  Byrne  was  brought  in  a  weak 
state  from  prison.  A  rescue  party  broke  in, 
and  the  inquest  showed  that  the  prisoner 
was  shot,  while  in  bed,  by  one  of  the  police 
guards.  He  was  taken  to  a  house  farther 
along  the  road,  where  he  died.  Some  of  the 
police  were  killed  or  wounded.  Another 
raid  for  arms  was  made  at  a  place  called 
Solohead  Beg,  outside  Tipperary,  and  a 
prisoner  was  being  taken  away.  A  rescue 
party  boarded  the  train  at  Knocklong. 
[SO] 


Ireland  under  the  Microscope 

There  was  a  bloody  battle,  beginning  with 
a  police  revolver  leveled  at  the  prisoner. 
There  were  casualties  on  both  sides.  It  is 
stated  that  two  Colonial  soldiers  who  were 
on  the  train  got  the  prisoner  away.  The 
wounded  rescuers  have  not  been  found, 
though  on  one  day  every  part  of  a  large 
area  was  searched  by  combined  police  and 
military.  The  roads  into  Dublin  are 
watched  lest  any  of  them  be  brought  there 
for  treatment.  I  can  credit  this,  for  one 
evening,  having  stayed  so  long  at  Maynooth 
that  the  last  train  for  Dublin  pulled  out  too 
soon  for  me,  I  took  a  motor  to  catch  the 
tramcar  at  Lucan.  At  Lucan  a  policeman 
stopped  the  car,  examined  the  license  of  the 
very  taciturn  driver,  satisfied  himself,  I 
suppose,  concerning  the  other  occupant  of 
the  car,  and  very  politely  told  us  where  we 
might  expect  to  overtake  the  tramcar.  I 
think  I  might  add  here,  at  whatever  risk  of 
[51] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

misinterpretation,  that,  coming  home  rather 
late  one  night,  I  dropped  my  latchkey, 
which  bounced  from  one  to  another  of  the 
stone  steps  with  which  Dublin  abounds. 
(If  the  Dublin  hotels  had  not  all  been 
closed  because  of  the  lockout  this  need  not 
have  happened.)  Out  of  the  adjacent  dark- 
ness a  policeman  came  to  help  me  find  it, 
and,  when  we  failed,  a  second  policeman 
with  a  searchlight.  One  could  not  but  feel 
himself  well  shepherded.  At  an  airdrome, 
at  meal  time,  forty  rifles  were  left  in  charge 
of  two  men.  Later  the  two  men  were  found, 
nicely  bound,  a  couple  of  miles  away,  but 

not  the  rifles.    So  it  goes  on. 

#     *     # 

Meanwhile,  the  evidences  of  effective 
military  occupation  are  sufficient.  Soldiers 
are  entering  Dublin  almost  every  day,  and 
going  on  to  other  places.  You  see  them  at 
Athlone,  for  instance.  You  see  them  parad- 
[52] 


Ireland  under  the  Microscope 

ing  for  church  at  Limerick.  You  see  them 
encamped  at  Clare.  The  airplane  you  see 
at  Cork  comes  down,  you  are  told,  from 
Fermoy.  The  crated  pigeons  you  see  at  a 
railway  station  are  designated  for  liberation 
during  daylight  hours.  Some  say  the  sol- 
diers do  not  like  their  mission  any  too  well, 
and  that  the  Scotch  troops,  especially,  get 
so  friendly  with  the  people  that  they  have 
to  be  moved  every  few  weeks.  Some  of 
them  even  desert  and  come  back,  and  when 
they  are  caught  are  sometimes  aided  to  give 
their  captors  the  slip.  Still,  there  they  are, 
with  all  the  approved  appurtenances,  and 
there  is  no  telling  from  day  to  day  what 
may  come  of  it.  Most  people  have  become 
familiar  with  the  conditions  to  the  point  of 
indifference.  Some,  as  suggested  by  the 
raids  for  arms,  are  not  indifferent.  An  Eng- 
lish Radical  Labor  paper  gives  currency  to 
the  idea  that  British  troops  are  being 
[S3] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

trained  in  Dublin  in  the  occupation  of  mili- 
tary vantage  points  in  a  city  with  some  con- 
sciousness on  the  part  of  the  military  au- 
thorities that  the  training  may  sometime  be 
found  useful  in  English  cities.  That  may 
be  only  a  guess,  but  in  Ireland  there  are 
many  who  believe  it  a  good  one.  Anyhow, 
training  in  the  occupation  of  Ireland  as  a 
whole  is  in  active  progress.  They  say  in 
Dublin  that  the  old  Duke  of  Wellington 
interfered  in  the  early  railway  plans  and 
caused  the  roads  to  be  located  with  an  eye 
to  their  military  value.  If  so,  then  one  of 
their  proposed  uses  is  being  well  served, 
which  is  something,  for  there  is  very  general 
complaint  that  in  other  respects  the  service 
of  Ireland  by  railroads  owned  in  England 
and  controlled  in  London  is  far  from  what 

it  might  be. 

*     *     * 

Stopping  one  Sunday  afternoon  at  a  way- 
[54] 


Ireland  under  the  Microscope 

side  public  house  in  the  hills  of  Clare, 
somebody  pointed  through  the  window  to 
a  hurling  match  going  on  a  quarter  of  a 
mile  away.  There  were  smiles  and 
chuckles,  the  meaning  of  which  was, 
"There  may  be  an  English  camp  two  miles 
away  on  the  other  side,  but  here  in  Clare 
we  play  Irish  games."  For  in  Ireland, 
while  cricket  is  loyal  and  respectable,  hurl- 
ing is  seditious  and  dangerous.  The  wrong 
sort  of  people  are  so  apt  to  foregather  at 
Gaelic  games.  Of  course,  the  foreign  mili- 
tary could  never  hope  to  control  that  and 
many  other  things  which  might  be  happen- 
ing in  a  normal  way  all  the  time.  They 
would  never  get  to  know.  It  is  by  the  police 
that  Ireland  is  kept  under  the  microscope, 
and  while  the  police  are  a  military  body 
they  are  Irish.  They  know,  and  they  know 
how  to  learn.  It  is  not  as  simple  as  it  used 
to  be.  These  Volunteers  and  Sinn  Fein 
[55] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

young  men  do  not  disclose  in  front  of  bars 
the  information  for  which  the  Castle  is 
waiting  and  which  in  earlier  crises  it  used 
to  get.  When  Mr.  Ryan  saw  three  young 
men  for  whom  the  police  and  military  had 
been  searching  all  one  afternoon  step  out 
of  the  Mansion  House  and  shake  hands  with 
hundreds  of  people  in  the  street,  he  experi- 
enced a  great  emotion.  "Thank  God,"  he 
said,  "the  informer  is  no  more."  One  can- 
not be  quite  sure.  The  police  whisper  to 
the  contrary,  but  events  do  not  seem  to  jus- 
tify their  statements.  They  even  begin  to 
feel,  if  one  may  judge  by  their  expressed 
desire  to  be  relieved  from  the  duty  of  carry- 
ing arms,  that  their  position  is  that  of  the 
scapegoat.  Some  of  them  have  undoubted- 
ly developed  the  man-hunting  passion,  but 
many  of  them,  when  they  began,  believed 
they  were  entering  upon  an  honorable  ca- 
reer. The  true  opinion  of  their  masters  is 
[56] 


Ireland  under  the  Microscope 

shown  by  the  fact  that  in  all  affairs  of  mo- 
ment they  make  the  police  hunt  in  couples, 
obliging  each  to  send  in  a  separate  report, 
which  may  include  comment  upon  the  ac- 
tion of  the  other.  I  have  heard  enough  to 
be  convinced  that  this  is  a  very  wise  pre- 
caution— and  that  it  is  sometimes  evaded. 
At  present,  the  English  authorities  are  im- 
posing upon  this  body  of  Irishmen,  with- 
out whom  they  would  be  helpless  in  Ire- 
land, a  very  great  strain.  It  is  they  who 
have  to  do  all  the  dangerous  and  difficult 
work,  to  enforce  all  the  prohibitions  which 
must  be  as  offensive  to  their  own  instincts 
as  to  those  of  any  other  Irishman. 

Only  in  the  Westport  district  is  there  real 
military  rule,  and  there,  were  it  not  for  the 
necessity  felt  in  London  of  giving  Ireland 
a  bad  name,  the  experiment  would  soon  be 
abandoned.  The  military  bustle  the  people 
about  a  good  deal,  turn  them  back  from 
[57] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

their  accustomed  church  if  it  is  on  the 
wrong  side  of  the  line,  forbid  priests  who 
know  all  the  byways,  and  who  pay  no  at- 
tention to  the  order,  to  cross  the  lines  even 
on  sick  calls,  and  do  everything  but  pro- 
duce the  murderer  of  the  magistrate  Mill- 
ing, whom  some  of  them  say,  nevertheless, 
they  could  name  if  required,  and  whom 
they  believe  to  be  one  of  their  own  class 
back  from  the  war. 

Ireland  has  served  notice  that  the  anom- 
aly of  being  kept  in  subjugation  by  an  army 
of  Irish  mercenaries  must  presently  cease 
to  be.  The  counsels  proposed  are  various. 
I  much  liked  myself  the  speech  of  Father 
O'Flanagan,  who,  when  requested  by  the 
police  to  disperse  a  meeting  he  was  billed 
to  address,  did  so  in  these  terms:  "We  are 
controlled  here,  and  deprived  of  our  right 
of  free  speech,  by  a  body  of  silent  men, 
Irishmen  like  ourselves,  who  conform  their 
[53] 


Ireland  under  the  Microscope 

action  to  the  orders  of  a  single  man.  Let 
us  train  ourselves,  also  in  silence,  to  follow 
that  example.  Then  before  long,  please 
God,  this  hateful  thing  will  disappear."  In 
silence,  perhaps,  but  not  in  idleness.  They 
are  making  of  the  police  a  laughing-stock 
as  well  as  of  the  foreign  military.  Mr.  Bar- 
ton, an  ex-army  captain,  another  Protestant 
who  speaks  Irish,  having  served  notice  that 
further  acts  of  police  or  Castle  vindictive- 
ness  would  be  visited  upon  the  head  of  the 
Governor — whose  social  habits  render  him 
somewhat  vulnerable — and  having  been  im- 
prisoned therefor,  left  his  card  for  the  jail 
governor  with  regret  at  not  being  able  to 
say  good-bye  in  person.  While  an  investi- 
gation was  proceeding,  news  came  that 
twenty-nine  more  had  just  scaled  the  prison 
wall.  The  presiding  officer  adjourned 
the  inquiry  to  go  and  report  the  excellent 
joke  to  his  friends  at  the  club.  Mr.  Barton 
[59] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

is  at  his  home  in  Wicklow,  except  when 
wanted.  The  others  have  still  a  free  foot. 
The  police  microscope  cannot  be  held  tight- 
ly over  Ireland  when  police  influence  has 
been  subverted  by  patriotism  and  weakened 

by  ridicule. 

*     #     # 

Still  these  microscopic  views,  which  could 
be  indefinitely  multiplied,  help  us  to  gauge 
the  difficulty  of  the  task  that  confronts  the 
men  who  have  turned  their  backs  on  West- 
minster, men  who,  with  millions  of  their 
countrymen,  believe  in  the  doctrine  of  one 
Woodrow  Wilson  ("Candle  Press,"  Dub- 
lin, "As  passed  by  censor")  that  the  world 
should  "be  made  safe  for  every  peace-lov- 
ing nation,  which,  like  our  own,  wishes  to 
live  its  own  life,  determine  its  own  institu- 
tions, be  assured  of  justice  and  fair  dealing 
by  other  peoples  of  the  world,  as  against 
force  and  selfish  aggression."  I  suppose, 
[60] 


Ireland  under  the  Microscope 

having  watched  the  Peace  Conference  at 
close  quarters  for  six  months,  one  ought  not 
to  hark  back  to  those  dim,  far  off,  forgotten 
things,  but  in  Ireland  one  is  impressed  with 
the  truth  of  what  an  author  has  recently 
written  (Butler,  "Confiscation  in  Irish  His- 
tory," p.  196)  about  "the  credulous  opti- 
mism of  the  Irish,  their  idea  that  logic  and 
right  should  overrule  might,  their  belief  in 
the  justice  of  their  cause  leading  them  to 
ask  for  the  unattainable."  Besides,  Mr.  Wil- 
son did  not  mention  at  the  time  that  these 
things  were  "unattainable"  in  Ireland,  and 
one  finds  so  many  people  who  think  he 
meant  what  he  did  say,  and  that  a  hundred 
million  more  of  us  also  meant  it  when  we 
said  we  agreed  with  him. 


[61] 


IV 
THE  MEN  OF  CLARE 

"I  deliberately  affirm,  that  a  Minister  of  the  Crown, 
responsible  at  the  time  of  which  I  am  speaking  for  the 
public  peace  and  the  public  welfare,  would  have  grossly 
and  scandalously  neglected  his  duty  if  he  had  failed  to 
consider  whether  it  might  not  be  possible  that  the  fever 
of  political  and  religious  excitement  which  was  quicken- 
ing the  pulse  and  fluttering  the  bosom  of  the  whole  Catholic 
population — which  had  inspired  the  serf  of  Clare  with  the 
resolution  and  energy  of  a  freeman — which  had  in  the 
twinkling  of  an  eye  made  all  consideration  of  personal 
gratitude — ancient  family  connection — local  preferences — 
the  fear  of  wordly  injury — the  hope  of  wordly  advantage, 
subordinate  to  the  one  absorbing  sense  of  religious  obliga- 
tion and  public  duty;  whether,  I  say,  it  might  not  be 
possible  that  the  contagion  of  that  feverish  excitement 
might  spread  beyond  the  barriers  which,  under  ordinary 
circumstances,  the  habits  of  military  obedience  and  the 
strictness  of  military  discipline  oppose  to  all  such  external 
influences."     (Sir  Robert  Peel,  "Memoirs,"  p.  122.) 


The  week  of  the  insurrection  in  1916  Mr. 
John  Dillon  spent  in  his  house  in  Great 
[62] 


The  Men  of  Clare 

George  Street,  Dublin.  The  street  was  on 
the  edge  of  the  conflict.  From  his  window 
he  witnessed  a  continuous  coming  and  going 
of  women,  silent,  hurrying  women,  always 
hurrying,  always  silent.  After  the  surren- 
der (which  was  received  by  a  general  officer 
who  shook  hands  with  Pearse  and  Connolly 
and  complimented  them,  as  soldier  to  sol- 
dier, upon  the  efficiency  of  their  defense), 
Mr.  Dillon's  house  was  filled  day  after  day 
with  relatives  of  the  Volunteers  who  had 
heard  of  executions  in  contemplation.  He 
went  to  General  Maxwell  and  inquired 
about  the  truth  of  the  report  that  more  than 
fifty  were  marked  for  summary  execution. 
Maxwell's  answer  was  that  he  meant  to 
make  such  an  example  that  sedition  would 
never  raise  its  head  in  Ireland  again.  Mr. 
Dillon  reminded  him  that  there  had  been  in 
South  Africa,  since  the  war  began,  an  insur- 
rection, after  whose  suppression  there  had 
[63] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

been  only  one  execution.  Maxwell  replied, 
"My  dear  Mr.  Dillon,  Botha  was  dealing 
with  his  own  people;  we're  not."  "What?" 
said  Mr.  Dillon,  "was  not  the  first  regiment 
I  saw  going  into  action  the  Dublins?  Was 
not  the  first  officer  I  saw  Lieutenant  Sheehy, 
a  son  of  my  own  colleague?  Did  they  stop 
to  ask  whether  the  rebels  were  their  own 
people?"  The  executions  proceeded.  The 
Dublins  were  even  forced  to  furnish  firing 
squads.  Arrests  followed  in  all  parts  of 
Nationalist  Ireland.  The  new  chapter  in 
Irish  history  opened  then.  Of  course  the 
material  was  always  present,  but  it  was 
Maxwell's  act,  revealing  as  it  did  the  truth 
about  the  essential  basis  upon  which  the 
"Union"  rests,  that  brought  to  the  surface 
much  that  had  been  submerged  during  the 
long  period  when  it  had  seemed  as  though 
the  Irish  cause  could  be  advanced  under  the 
rules  of  the  English  Parliamentary  arena,  it 
[64] 


The  Men  of  Clare 

being  always  assumed  that  to  any  decision 
obtained  there  the  English  would  honorably 
conform. 

Upon  Mr.  Dillon's  return  to  London  he 
made  a  speech  which,  at  any  other  time, 
would  have  marked  the  opening  of  an  attack 
upon  the  Government  along  the  whole  line. 
Mr.  Redmond's  judgment  was  that,  because 
of  the  attitude  the  Irish  Parliamentary 
Party  had  taken  at  the  outset  of  the  war, 
when  it  elected  to  trust  to  the  honor  of 
England  as  witnessed  by  the  affixing  of  the 
King's  signature  to  the  thrice-passed  Home 
Rule  act,  this  course  was  not  open.  For  my 
part  I  have  no  doubt  that  Mr.  Redmond,  at 
this  crisis,  so  far  from  making  an  arbitrary 
decision  in  accord  with  his  own  preferences, 
had  a  clear  vision  of  what  the  consequences 
must  be.  If  the  representatives  of  Ireland 
in  Parliament  could  not  carry  on  the  fight 
there,  then,  if  later  events  showed  a  fight 
[65] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

had  to  be  made,  first  it  must  be  made  in  Ire- 
land without  echo  in  London,  and  second 
it  must  be  made  by  others  than  those  who 
had  confidence  in  the  adequacy  of  recourse 
to  Parliament;  finally,  the  issue  as  to 
whether  continuance  of  Parliamentary  gov- 
ernment as  a  medium  through  which  the 
Irish  people  could  hope  to  exercise  the 
rights,  fundamental  to  the  success  of  that 
system  in  its  English  environment,  of  peti- 
tion and  redress,  was  thereafter  to  be  wholly 
in  the  hands  of  the  English  Cabinet,  the 
English  parties,  and  English  statesmanship. 
The  clear-sighted  and  courageous  Bishop 
O'Dwyer  of  Limerick  was  the  first  to  pro- 
nounce sentence  of  definite  failure,  for  Ire- 
land, upon  Parliamentary  government  un- 
der the  Union. 

As  developments  in  Ireland  were  neces- 
sarily contingent  upon  the  success  or  fail- 
ure of  English  parties  to  preserve  the  credit 
[66] 


The  Men  of  Clare 

of  their  institutions  when  put  to  this  test,  it 
will  be  both  useful  and  convenient  to  con- 
sider that  aspect  of  the  subject  first.  The 
excitement  over  the  executions  was  still 
running  high  (and  not  only  in  Ireland  but 
also  in  America,  not  then  in  the  war  but  al- 
most hostile  to  England  because  of  the  shock 
produced  by  the  executions  and  the  resur- 
gence of  old  memories  of  Hessian  methods) 
when  the  Prime  Minister,  Mr.  Asquith, 
authorized  Mr.  Lloyd  George  to  open  ne- 
gotiations with  Mr.  Redmond  and  Sir  Ed- 
ward Carson  for  a  settlement.  They  agreed 
upon  a  basis,  which  involved  concession  to 
the  principle  of  partition.  True,  it  turned 
out  afterwards  that  Lloyd  George  had  given 
Carson  assurances  of  which  Redmond  was 
not  informed  and  which  were  at  variance 
with  the  written  agreement.  It  was  the  de- 
vice of  a  gamester  whose  stakes,  and  they 
were  high  ones,  were  in  America,  but  Red- 
[67] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

mond  and  Dillon  were  not  without  their 
suspicions.  They  said  to  Lloyd  George, 
"Now  we  are  going  to  Ireland  to  do  a  thing 
most  offensive  to  us  and  which  only  the  ex- 
ercise of  what  authority  remains  with  us 
can  possibly  enable  us  to  do.  But  if  we  suc- 
ceed, where  will  we  be  then?  You,  after 
all,  are  not  Prime  Minister,  and  we  do  not 
know  what  the  Cabinet  may  do."  Mr. 
George  answered  that  he  was  delegated  by 
the  Prime  Minister  and  the  Cabinet  to  this 
mission,  and  that  if,  on  acceptance,  the  Cab- 
inet interfered,  he  and  Mr.  Asquith  would 
go  to  the  King  and  present  their  resigna- 
tions. On  that  assurance  they  went  to  Ire- 
land and,  by  the  persuasive  eloquence  of 
Mr.  Devlin  and  Mr.  Redmond's  veiled 
threat  of  resignation,  succeeded.  In  the  end 
Mr.  Redmond  and  Mr.  Dillon  were  asked 
to  the  War  Office,  where  Mr.  Samuels  told 
them,  Mr.  George  being  present,  as  a  final- 
[68] 


The  Men  of  Clare 

ity  and  not  as  a  matter  for  discussion,  that 
the  Cabinet  had  rejected  the  agreement. 

In  similar  circumstances  in  the  seven- 
teenth century,  when  the  Irish  adherents  of 
Charles  II  were  tricked  out  of  lands  by  law 
restored  to  them,  Sir  William  Petty,  the 
Carson  of  his  day,  who  then  secured  posses- 
sion of  the  estates  which  descended  to  Lord 
Lansdowne,  a  prime  mover  in  this  twentieth 
century  betrayal,  wrote :  "Upon  the  playing 
of  this  game  or  match  upon  so  great  odds, 
the  English  won  and  have  (among  and  be- 
sides other  pretences)  a  gamester's  right  at 
least  to  their  estates." 

To  the  question  what  he  now  proposed  to 
do,  Mr.  Lloyd  George  replied  that  his  im- 
portance in  the  councils  of  the  Empire  pre- 
cluded his  resigning.  Mr.  Dillon  com- 
mented that  he  supposed  they  realized  they 
had  destroyed  constitutionalism  in  Ireland, 
and  that,  while  in  a  career  of  forty  years  he 
[69] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

thought  he  had  been  the  witness  of  the  worst 
that  public  men  could  do,  this  announce- 
ment revealed  that  there  were  depths  to 
which  statesmen  could  descend  beyond  what 
even  he  had  thought  possible.  And  I  am 
told  Mr.  Redmond  said:  "You  and  your 
Empire  may  go  to" — the  place  reserved  by 
Cromwell  for  the  Irish  who  had  prejudices 
against  Connaught.  He  was  a  patient  man, 
but  I  hope  the  story  is  true. 

When,  the  next  year,  America  entered  the 
war,  not  only  did  Mr.  Balfour  turn  Jeffer- 
sonian  Democrat  in  America,  but,  to  make 
assurance  doubly  sure,  Mr.  Lloyd  George 
set  up  the  Irish  Convention.  Again  he 
loaded  the  gamester's  dice,  for  he  gave  Car- 
son the  assurance  that  nothing  would  be 
done  unless  Carson's  friends  assented, 
whereupon  they  resolutely  refused  to  assent 
to  anything,  and  at  the  end  of  a  year  Lloyd 
George  rejected  the  findings  of  the  Conven- 
[70] 


The  Men  of  Clare 

tion,  which  lay  before  him  unread,  as  he 
publicly  owned.  I  have  seen  a  letter  writ- 
ten by  Mr.  Redmond  just  before  the  Con- 
vention broke  up,  possibly  the  last  he  wrote, 
for  in  a  month  he  was  dead,  in  which  he 
said  he  was  hopeless  of  the  Convention  do- 
ing any  good;  that  Lloyd  George  had  as- 
sured him  the  report  would  be  followed  by 
legislation,  but  that  he  was  unable  to  believe 
either  that  Lloyd  George  would  stand  up  to 
Ulster  or  that  he  would  offer  anything  Ire- 
land could  accept.  Lloyd  George  did  in- 
troduce legislation — to  conscript  Ireland  by 
England.  Mr.  Redmond  had  gone  on  rec- 
ord as  to  the  consequences  that  must  follow 
if  Irish  leaders  who  trusted  England  were 
thus  "let  down  and  betrayed."  I  remember 
writing  of  him  in  May,  1916,  in  a  paper  I 
founded  for  him,  that  his  epitaph  would  be : 
"He  trusted  England." 

But  of  the  Irish  Convention  something 
[71] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

more  should  be  said.  The  Government  did 
try  to  make  it  the  means  of  outgaming  Ire- 
land. There  was  a  time  when,  had  the 
Irish,  led  within  the  Convention  at  a  cer- 
tain crisis  by  Bishop  O'Donnell  of  Raphoe, 
in  whom  there  appeared  a  rebirth  of  the 
intrepid  spirit  of  his  ancient  warlike  clan, 
been  willing  to  forego  the  control  of  the 
customs  and  excise,  something  might  have 
been  done  to  let  Parliament,  under  cover  of 
the  Convention's  authority,  produce  a  meas- 
ure that  would  have  been  utterly  unaccept- 
able. At  that  moment,  first  the  Viceroy  and 
then  the  Chief  Secretary  offered  to  another 
influential  member  of  the  Convention  his 
choice  of  titles  if  he  would  withdraw  his 
support  from  Bishop  O'Donnell.  The  bait 
was  rejected.  At  another  moment,  Lord 
Londonderry  was  ready  to  draft  a  measure 
for  the  government  of  Ireland,  but  his  asso- 
ciates dissuaded  him.  Another  powerful 
[72] 


The  Men  of  Clare 

Ulster  delegate  had  no  other  answer  to 
make,  to  a  friendly  critic,  than  this:  "Re- 
member that  while  we  are  all  fighting 
Home  Rule  we  get  along  very  well  with 
Labor."  Others,  none  too  fond  of  England, 
however  willing  to  dissimulate  in  public, 
knowing  only  too  well  the  industrial  history 
of  Ireland,  were  deterred  by  fear  of  what 
England  would  do  to  their  business  if  they 
became  Irish  and  not  an  English  garrison 
in  Ireland.1 

However,  thanks  to  Bishop  O'Donnell 
and  his  friends  inside  the  Convention,  in- 
cluding George  Russell  and  Edward  Ly- 
saght,  both  of  the   Plunkett  school,  who 

^'Ireland  would  very  soon  find  that,  with  a  policy  framed 
not  to  suit  the  United  Kingdom,  but  Britain  alone,  laws 
would  be  passed  that  would  have  no  regard  to  the  interests 
of  Ireland,  and  very  soon  would  place  her  in  the  position 
she  once  was  in,  when,  before  the  Union,  her  trade  was 
ruined  by  laws  selfishly  enacted  to  promote  the  interest 
of  Britain." — Sir  Edward  Carson,  New  York  Herald, 
June   22,    1919. 

[73] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

would  not  assent  to  consecrating  anew  that 
English  overlordship  of  Irish  industry 
which  they  knew  had  been  consistently  used 
for  its  destruction,  and  still  more  thanks  to 
what  was  going  on  in  Ireland  outside,  the 
Convention  failed  to  do  the  work  of  any  and 
all  who  sought  to  use  it  for  Ireland's  injury. 
Lloyd  George  threw  into  the  waste  basket 
the  report  of  its  deliberations — and  his  own 
solemn  promise,  made  for  American  con- 
sumption, to  be  guided  by  its  findings. 

And  now  as  to  what  went  on  outside. 
Here  something  new  had  happened.  We 
have  been  accustomed  to  chant  a  long  litany 
of  the  names  of  men  who  were  leaders  of 
Ireland.  If  anyone  wishes  to  know  the  true 
name  of  Mr.  Redmond's  successor,  I  think 
I  can  tell  him.  It  is  The  People  of  Ireland. 
"You  ask  can  we  depend  upon  the  people," 
I  heard  Father  O'Flanagan  say.  "I  tell 
you  I  reverence  the  people  of  Ireland.  They 
[74] 


The  Men  of  Clare 

arc  better  than  I  am,  better  than  any  of  us, 
better  than  all  of  us  who  presume  to  speak 
for  them."  The  milestones  on  the  road 
traveled  under  this  leadership  have  been, 
Roscommon,  Longford,  Clare,  Cavan,  gen- 
eral election — and  what  has  followed. 

When  Roscommon  fell  vacant,  Mr.  Dil- 
lon was  furnished  with  proof  of  the  accu- 
racy of  his  predictions.  The  people  were 
next  neighbors  to  his  own  riding,  and  had 
known  him  for  forty  years.  They  must 
have  spared  him  the  personal  declaration  of 
their  thought,  for  he  believed  the  Party  can- 
didate would  win.  But  Roscommon  had 
sent  for  Count  Plunkett,  who  had  one  son  in 
Maxwell's  quicklime,  another  in  an  English 
prison,  who  had  been  in  prison  himself, 
and  his  wife  as  well.  He  had  just  been  re- 
moved from  an  important  position  in  the 
field  of  Irish  letters  at  the  demand  of  the 
ascendancy  class.  He  was  elected.  Next 
[75] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

came  Longford.  "Here,"  said  a  young 
editor  in  describing  it,  "we  had  our  first 
thrill.  We  used  to  go  to  the  meetings  with 
the  flag  of  the  Easter  Republic  waving  from 
a  score  of  motor  cars.  The  enthusiasm  was 
wonderful."  After  the  voting  an  old  par- 
liamentarian was  asked  by  Lloyd  George, 
"What  does  this  mean?"  "It  means  the  end 
of  the  constitutional  movement."  "That 
will  be  a  bad  business  for  the  Empire,  won't 
it?"     "I  think  before  you're  through  you 

will  find  it  a  d d  bad  business."    Next 

came  Clare.  The  party  candidate  was  very 
popular  and  universally  respected.  There 
were  long  conferences  among  the  people 
as  to  wTho  should  oppose  him.  Finally  they 
said,  "Let  us  finish  this  business.  Give  us  a 
soldier."  In  three  minutes  they  nominated 
DeValera.  From  Limerick  as  many  as 
6,000  people  would  swarm  out  through  the 
hills,  in  cars  and  carts,  on  bicycles  or  on  foot, 
[76] 


The  Men  of  Clare 

thirty  miles  if  necessary,  men  and  women, 
to  his  meetings.  The  vote  was  two  to  one  in 
his  favor. 

Then  Cavan.  By  this  time  the  governors 
of  Ireland  were  seeing  a  great  light.  Ninety 
men  and  women  went  in  to  organize  Cavan. 
The  Government  arrested  eighty-six  of 
them  and  took  them  off  to  prison  in  Eng- 
land. The  world  was  told,  by  the  most 
reputable  statesmen  in  England,  from  the 
floor  of  the  mother  of  parliaments,  that  they 
were  arrested  because  a  German  plot  had 
been  discovered.  The  Lord  Lieutenant  of 
Ireland,  Lord  Wimborne,  an  honorable 
man,  told  the  world  from  his  place  in  the 
House  of  Lords  that  there  was  no  German 
plot.  No  matter.  They  stayed  in  jail  and 
no  charges  were  ever  made  against  them. 
By  an  accident  which  must  have  been  much 
regretted,  the  police  overlooked  one  man 
who  knew  all  about  election  organization. 
[77] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

He  quickly  replaced  the  eighty-six  leaders 
with  eighty-six  seconds,  perhaps  more.  The 
result  was  as  decisive  as  it  would  have  been 
had  the  police  been  spared  the  trouble  and 
the  statesmen  been  spared  the  misstatement. 
And  in  time  followed  the  general  election, 
at  which  the  people  of  Ireland  elected 
seventy-three  men  to  stay  away  from  West- 
minster and  see  what  they  could  do  for  Ire- 
land at  home.  They  had  appealed  to  the 
people  to  vote  for  the  independence  of  Ire- 
land, and  with  most  of  the  candidates  in 
jail,  including  all  the  leaders,  with  Mr. 
Redmond  dead,  broken-hearted,  after  being 
once  too  often  "let  down  and  betrayed"  by 
Parliament  and  Cabinets  in  London,  and 
with  the  Wilson  appeals  to  the  world  ring- 
ing in  their  ears,  the  people  voted  for  free- 
dom and  for  a  self-reliant  Ireland.  The 
old  Party  men,  almost  all  of  them  feeling 
that  events  had  marched  with  the  stateliness 
[78] 


The  Men  of  Clare 

of  Greek  tragedy  since  the  day  when  they, 
rather  than  embarrass  the  Government  in 
the  midst  of  war,  turned  over  to  English 
statesmen  the  responsibility  for  the  reputa- 
tion of  constitutional  agitation  and  the  fu- 
ture efficacy  of  Parliamentary  action,  stood 
up  honorably  and  faced  certain  defeat, 
many  of  them  well  satisfied  to  be  recorded 
as  victims  in  the  pleasure  it  gave  them  to 
witness  the  awakening  of  the  soul  of  Ire- 
land. 

The  spirit  shown  was  no  new  thing  in 
Ireland.  They  tell  us,  sometimes,  that  the 
Irish  leaders  are  but  applying  the  principle 
enunciated  by  Patrick  Henry,  but  long  be- 
fore Patrick  Henry  thundered  in  Virginia, 
this  language  was  held  in  Dublin  by 
Thomas  Fizgerald,  Silken  Thomas  of  the 
Sword :  "If  it  be  my  mishap  to  miscarry  as 
you  seem  to  prognosticate,  catch  as  catch 
may.  I  will  take  the  market  as  it  riseth, 
[79] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

and  will  choose  rather  to  die  with  valiant- 
ness  and  liberty,  than  to  live  under  King 
Henry  in  bondage  and  villainy.''  His  in- 
itials are  to  be  seen  where  he  carved  them 
afterwards  in  the  stone  of  the  keep  in  the 
Tower  of  London  before  his  option  was 
made  good.  Prisons  in  England  and  Ire- 
land are  today  filled  with  Irishmen  of  his 
way  of  thinking.  Thousands  more  are  ex- 
pecting the  call  thither,  and  they  show  no 
concern.  It  has  actually  been  testified  in 
court  against  a  man  that  he  was  arrested 
"because  he  had  a  determined  face,  like  a 
Sinn  Feiner."  Sir  Robert  Peel's  descrip- 
tion fits.  But  what  is  in  the  minds  of  the 
modern  wearers  of  the  mantle  of  Sir  Robert 
Peel? 

I  do  not  pretend  to  know,  but  there  are 
some  sidelights  which  may  be  helpful  as  in- 
dications, if  not  as  guides.     What  I  have 
written  about  the  Irish  Convention  indi- 
[80] 


The  Men  of  Clare 

cates  that  Mr,  Duke,  who  succeeded  Mr. 
Birrell  as  Chief  Secretary,  tried  to  do  some- 
thing with  the  Convention.  Bishop  O'Don- 
nell  prevented  his  doing  a  mischief,  and 
probably  the  Cabinet  were  equally  inhibi- 
tive  in  another  sense,  for  he  went  from  Ire- 
land to  London  with  a  great  show  of  forc- 
ing an  issue — and  was  appointed  a  judge. 
Mr.  Shortt,  who  succeeded  him,  had  the 
idea  that  he  could  pacify  Ireland  by  ar- 
ranging for  industrial  and  commercial  de- 
velopment, under  English  auspices,  with  the 
help  of  a  grant  from  the  treasury.  He  went 
to  London,  got  the  consent  of  the  War  Cab- 
inet (Mr.  Bonar  Law  being  a  member)  and 
then  went  to  the  Chancellor  of  the  Ex- 
chequer (Mr.  Bonar  Law)  for  the  money — 
and  was  refused.  He  became  quite  angry 
and — was  promoted  to  the  office  of  Home 
Secretary.  Mr.  MacPherson,  who  gives  no 
indication  of  rising  above  the  level  of  a 
[81] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

time-serving  politician,  causes  great  amuse- 
ment by  the  precautions  he  takes,  when  in 
Ireland,  for  his  personal  security,  and  offers 
the  opinion  that  what  is  wrong  with  Ireland 
is  that  too  many  male  children  have  attained 
their  growth  at  home  instead  of  emigrating. 
Mr.  Birrell  declared  on  oath  in  the  Har- 
dinge  inquiry  that  a  parrot  calling  "Ireland, 
Ireland"  would  have  more  influence  in  the 
Cabinet  than  the  Chief  Secretary  for  Ire- 
land, and  Mr.  MacPherson  is  of  political 
and  intellectual  stature  far  below  Mr.  Bir- 
rell's.  I  am  told  that  Lord  French,  believ- 
ing that  he  was  the  ruler  of  Ireland,  and 
finding  that  he  could  not  get  dependable 
information,  attempted  to  organize  a  service 
of  reports  of  his  own,  but  neither  the  Castle 
nor  the  general  officer  commanding  the 
army  of  occupation  would  hear  of  such  a 
thing. 
The  very  astute  Lord  Haldane  visited 

[82] 


The  Men  of  Clare 

Dublin  to  endeavor  to  ascertain  whether 
Sinn  Fein  could  be  got  to  discuss  a  form  of 
solution  he  knew  perfectly  well  the  Cabinet 
would  not  ofler  while  Carson  was  there  to 
wield  his  whip.  Carson  has  no  policy  at  all, 
except  that  of  "extending  to  Ireland  all 
measures  that  are  found  beneficial  to  Great 
Britain,"  a  policy  which  covers  keeping 
Henry  Ford  out  of  Cork  because  his  works, 
if  in  Southampton,  would  be  "found  bene- 
ficial to  Great  Britain."  Carson,  indeed,  is 
the  one  person  quite  satisfied,  if  America 
will  only  agree  with  him  that  nothing  need 
be  done  about  Ireland  except  defame  its 
people  from  the  Woolsack — and  be  liberal 
with  money  credits.  Nobody  in  Ireland  is 
willing  to  engage  in  conversations  to  which 
Lloyd  George  is  a  party.  The  men  who 
have  had  most  experience  with  him  are  the 
least  willing  of  all.  British  Labor  is  looked 
upon  with  a  not  unfriendly  eye,  but  it  is  felt 
[S3] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

that,  with  the  exception  of  the  Irish  in  Lan- 
cashire, British  Labor,  in  its  inmost  heart,  is 
slavishly  subservient  to  the  English  ruling 
class.  Is  it  to  be  wondered  at,  therefore,  if 
those  who  carried  on  the  Clare  election  un- 
der the  eyes  of  an  army  corps,  and  voted  for 
independence  in  presence  of  an  army  of  oc- 
cupation, are  content  to  go  on  without  much 
caring  what  British  statesmen  are  thinking, 
building  their  hopes  on  self-reliance — and 
believing  that  America  will  not  see  them 
hurt? 


[84] 


V 
THE  POLICY  OF  SELF-RELIANCE 

1  SPENT  a  week-end  in  Sligo  and  Mayo. 
My  host,  who  had  gone  from  Ireland 
as  a  boy,  and  who  had  made  a  notable  busi- 
ness and  municipal  success  in  Lancashire, 
is  living  in  a  large  house  some  miles  out  of 
Ballina.  On  his  property  is  the  castle  of 
one  of  the  O'Dowds,  dating  from  the  period 
of  Elizabeth.  It  is  well  preserved,  and 
gives  clear  indication  that  the  owners  lived 
in  conditions  of  ease  and  power,  which  must 
have  been  based  upon  the  revenues  from  a 
populous  and  prosperous  countryside. 
When  the  lands  were  taken  from  the  Irish, 
a  Protestant  Planter  obtained  possession.  It 
is  in  the  house  long  occupied  by  this  family 
that  my  friend  now  lives.  He  has  the  land 
[85] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

which  immediately  surrounded  the  manor, 
much  of  it  planted  with  trees  that  are  now 
very  old.  In  front  are  the  Ox  mountains. 
These  old  Planters  knew  how  to  build  for  a 
view.  All  the  rest  of  the  estate  is  cut  up, 
thanks  to  the  hard-won  triumph  of  the  cam- 
paign for  the  land,  into  farms  of  about  thirty 
acres,  with  pleasant  two-story  cottages.  "Do 
you  realize,"  asked  my  host,  "that  within 
a  single  lifetime  all  this  was  covered  with 
poor  cabins  containing  a  large  population; 
that  the  people  were  deliberately  driven 
away  to  America;  that  their  cabins  were 
razed,  their  fences  destroyed  and  the  whole 
land  given  over  to  cattle  and  sheep  to  graze ; 
and  that  already,  after  a  struggle  made  in 
face  of  the  heaviest  odds,  the  people  are 
back  on  the  land?  And  still  they  tell  us  the 
Irish  are  a  flighty,  volatile  people,  without 
capacity  for  persistence  in  the  attainment  of 
a  great  object;  still  they  speak  with  con- 
[86] 


The  Policy  of  Self-Reliance 

tempt  of  agitation  in  a  country  where  every 
proper  patriotic  impulse  is  restrained  in  its 
expression  by  visible  and  invisible  force  di- 
rected by  exterior  agencies  hostile  to  Irish 
interest." 

One  afternoon  we  walked  three  Irish 
miles  across  country  to  Inniscrone,  at  the 
head  of  Killala  Bay,  and  as  we  came  back  I 
remarked  to  him,  "Twenty  years  ago  we 
used  to  be  told  that  the  sheep  on  the  hill- 
sides were  a  great  wrong  to  Ireland.  Now, 
presumably,  the  sheep  and  cattle  which  we 
have  seen  in  nearly  every  field  are  matter  for 
pride.  But  does  it  not  seem  to  you  that  with 
almost  all  of  the  thirty  acres  divided  be- 
tween fields  for  grazing  and  fields  for  fod- 
der the  problems  of  population  are  pres- 
ently bound  to  press?  These  little  farms 
must  surely  represent  an  economic  mini- 
mum, and  what  is  to  become  of  the  children 
a  farmer  dares  to  raise  on  a  farm  which  does 
[87] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

not  admit  of  division?"  I  had  the  same 
thought  on  Sunday.  We  went  to  Mass  at 
what,  not  long  ago,  was  a  practically  aban- 
doned church.  The  sheep  of  the  old  days 
were  not  good  parishioners.  Now  the  build- 
ing has  been  extended  and  improved.  Two 
galleries  have  been  constructed  in  the  tran- 
septs, and  they  were  filled  with  young  men 
of  from  eighteen  to  twenty-five.  They  were 
the  new  crop  of  the  land  in  this  corner  of 
the  O'Dowds,  and  they  had  not  gone  to 
America.  I  commented  to  Dr.  McCaffrey, 
President  of  Maynooth,  afterwards,  that 
evidently  this  condition  imposed  upon  the 
priest,  the  only  one  at  present  in  position  to 
serve,  new  obligations  in  the  way  of  what 
we  on  our  side  of  the  Atlantic  describe  as 
social  service.  He  answered  that  the  need 
had  been  recognized  and  that  the  necessary 
machinery  had  already  been  put  in  motion, 
at  least  in  its  beginnings. 
[88] 


The  Policy  of  Self- Reliance 

Later,  in  Dublin,  I  had  the  opportunity 
of  discussing  the  farm  problem  with  a  Bal- 
lina  merchant,  and  this  is  what  he  told  me : 
"I  saw  long  ago  the  danger  in  the  conditions 
you  describe.  So  I  used  to  tell  the  farmers 
they  ought  not  to  depend  wholly  on  live- 
stock. I  encouraged  them  to  grow  apples, 
offering  to  take  all  they  produced.  I  wish 
you  could  see  the  first  they  brought  in  to  me. 
But  I  showed  them  the  profit  to  be  had  from 
proper  picking  and  packing,  and  today 
there  is  a  heavy  business  done,  and  both  the 
revenue  and  value  of  the  farms  have  in- 
creased. I  am  doing  the  same  around  Gal- 
way,  where  I  have  another  place,  and  there 
I  am  starting  a  factory  for  preserving  the 
fruit."  "You  know  what  will  happen,  I 
suppose,"  commented  one  who  was  present. 
"It  is  true  they  have  just  fined  the  Keillers, 
of  Scotland,  for  daring  to  export  marmalade 
to  Ireland,  but  if  you  start  in  Galway  they 
[89] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

will  undersell  you  there  until  you  have  to 
close  up.  They  have  the  sugar.  They  con- 
trol our  shipping.  They  control  our  rail- 
ways. They  control  our  banks.  Your  fac- 
tory will  not  be  very  big,  but  one  way  or 
another  they  will  not  let  you  have  it."  "No 
matter,"  was  the  answer,  "I  have  thought  of 
all  that;  and  I  am  going  to  do  it.  If  I  can 
provide  for  a  quarter  of  the  demand  of  the 
Province  of  Connaught,  it  will  do  for  a 
good  while  yet.  And  I  don't  think  the  con- 
trol of  our  transportation,  which  they  are 
handing  over  to  an  English  Minister,  will 
stop  me  either,  unless  he  commandeers  the 
motors  which  we  already  operate  on  all  the 
main  roads." 

At  the  same  conference  the  question  of 
banks  came  up.  "Let  me  give  you  two  in- 
stances," said  one  man.  "I  buy  a  certain 
line  of  goods  in  Philadelphia.  Now,  in  any 
other  part  of  the  world  banking  service 
[90] 


The  Policy  of  Self-Reliance 

would  be  available  to  enable  me  to  pay  for 
such  goods  on  their  delivery  accompanied 
by  a  bill  of  lading.  Not  in  Ireland.  I  have 
to  send  the  money  for  my  goods  to  Phila- 
delphia, and  if  there  is  anything  wrong 
when  they  come  so  much  the  worse  for  me. 
I  could  have  all  the  money  I  want  if  I  chose 
to  be  guided  by  the  bank  manager  and  buy 
certain  shares  the  investment  in  which  is 
encouraged  by  his  directors.  Mark  you, 
this  is  Irish  money,  the  savings  of  Irish 
people,  but  it  is  controlled  from  London, 
and  London  is  not  concerned  about  encour- 
aging industry  or  business  in  Ireland.  Quite 
the  contrary.  Not  long  ago  I  secured  a  con- 
tract for  £12,000  a  month  for  foodstuffs,  all 
to  be  had  in  Ireland,  from  a  South  African 
firm,  wealthy  Jews,  who  operate  a  chain  of 
shops  and  whose  credit  is  high.  There  was 
no  banking  money  in  Ireland  to  see  that 
through  its  initial  stages.  So  I  went  to  Lon- 
[91] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

don.  They  said  to  me,  'Your  business  is  too 
small  to  interest  us.  We  would  rather  give 
a  credit  of  £100,000  to  a  London  trading 
house  than  be  bothered  with  these  small 
things.'  So  I  had  to  give  up  the  contract 
and  an  Englishman  got  it.  He  could  get 
the  discount  he  needed.  I  dare  say  he  is 
even  rilling  the  order  with  Irish  goods." 
This  reminded  me  of  another  story  I  had 
been  told.  An  American  who  saw  in  Paris 
a  London  invoice  for  £1,000  for  Irish  lace 
had  the  curiosity  to  trace  the  material,  and 
found  it  had  cost  £550  in  Ireland.  Ireland 
is  trying  to  establish  direct  trade  relations 
with  France,  but  neither  England  nor  any 
of  the  transportation  or  banking  interests 
controlled  by  England  in  Ireland  are  eager 
to  help  her  do  it. 

Some  time  ago,  a  great  English  manufac- 
turer was  in  trouble.     He  had  opened  a 
branch  in  Ireland,  and  the  success  of  his 
[92] 


The  Policy  of  Self-Reliance 

dealings  with  the  British  government  de- 
partments, he  was  given  to  understand,  de- 
pended upon  his  withdrawing  from  this 
venture.  He  succeeded  in  getting  clear,  and 
fire  has  since  completed  the  deliverance. 
But  during  conversations  with  him  and  his 
manager  it  came  out  that  they  had  made  a 
secret  survey  of  the  resources  of  Ireland, 
and  found  it  to  be  one  of  the  richest  coun- 
tries in  the  world.  In  one  county,  for  ex- 
ample, they  found  the  best  conditions  for  a 
pottery  industry  known  to  pottery  experts 
anywhere.  But  why  seek  to  develop  this  op- 
portunity, with  Staffordshire  ready  to  sup- 
ply Ireland  and  the  rest  of  the  world  with 
all  the  pottery  needed?  The  ships  and  rail- 
ways exist  to  bring  English  manufactures 
into  Ireland,  not  to  take  Irish  wares  out, 
and  the  freight  tariffs  for  Ireland  are  con- 
trolled in  London.  Dublin  shipping  is  con- 
trolled by  the  interests  most  intimately  con- 
[93] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

cerned,  of  which  the  chief  is  the  London 
and  Northwestern  railway  and  the  least  is 
Ireland  itself.  Advantage  has  been  taken  of 
war  conditions  to  reduce  Irish-owned  ship- 
ping to  the  vanishing  point  and  even  to  pre- 
vent the  one  remaining  Irish  shipping  con- 
cern from  making  good  the  losses  sustained 
by  government  commandeering  of  ships  and 
sinkings  by  the  submarines. 

Away  up  in  the  hills  of  Donegal,  in  one 
of  those  fringes  where  men  and  women  man- 
aged to  live  and  no  more  by  going  to  the 
English  harvests  (where  they  were  per- 
mitted to  share  the  accommodations  of  the 
beasts  of  the  fields  and  subsisted  on  a  far 
lower  scale),  a  man  with  vision  established 
a  glove-making  industry  which  gives  work 
at  home  to  the  people  who  live  there  among 
the  stones  which  shelter  the  little  patches  of 
made  soil — people  to  whom  the  Irish  intel- 
lectuals now  send  their  children  that  they 
[94] 


The  Policy  of  Self-Reliance 

may  hear  and  learn  to  speak  the  old  Irish 
tongue  and  imbibe  a  little  of  the  spirit 
which  enabled  such  people  to  survive  after 
being  driven  from  the  fat  grazing  meadows 
to  these  rocky  wastes.  Well,  this  was  a  prac- 
tical man,  and  he  contracted  with  an  Eng- 
lish agent  for  the  sale  of  the  gloves.  Irish 
people  would  like  to  buy  these  gloves,  but 
Irish  shops  cannot  get  them. 

In  Cork  I  sought  and  met  with  a  man 
who,  landing  in  New  York  when  a  boy, 
learned  what  was  to  be  known  of  mill  or- 
ganization, made  a  little  money,  and  went 
back  to  Ireland.  Let  me  interject  here  that 
the  manager  for  the  great  English  factory 
before  referred  to,  when  asked  about  the 
efficiency  of  Irish  workers,  replied  that  at 
first,  not  having  behind  them  generations  of 
training  and  experience  as  in  England,  they 
were  somewhat  trying  to  a  superintendent's 
patience,  but  that  after  a  couple  of  years 
[95] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

they  were  better  than  the  English.  This 
other  man,  having  taken  a  little  woolen  mill, 
had  to  overcome  the  same  condition.  After 
two  or  three  years,  however,  the  mill  suc- 
ceeded, and  now  there  is  work  for  every 
available  worker,  man  or  woman,  within 
four  miles.  Going  one  day  to  buy  a  piece  of 
machinery  in  an  abandoned  mill,  he  was 
asked  whether  he  would  not  help  the  neigh- 
borhood by  starting  that  mill  too.  He  did, 
and  made  a  success  of  it.  This  man  said  to 
me,  "We  would  like  to  add  to  these  plants, 
but  prices  are  so  high  and  the  control  of 
materials  has  been  so  vexing  that  just  now 
this  cannot  be  done.  But  it  will  be.  We 
must  build  our  industrial  life,  which  Ire- 
land must  have,  on  our  own  foundations. 
For  years  there  has  been  no  emigration  from 
the  countryside  where  our  first  mill  is,  and 
that  should  be  true  all  over  Ireland,  for  we 
must  stop  the  drain  upon  our  national  life- 
[96] 


The  Policy  of  Self-Reliance 

blood.  There  is  no  good  reason  why  there 
should  not  be  industries  dotted  all  over  Ire- 
land. It  was  that  way  in  the  old  days.  But 
when  two  millions  of  the  people  perished 
for  want  of  the  abundant  harvest  that  was 
sent  away  for  rack  rents,  and  when  millions 
more  were  driven  abroad  to  make  way  for 
the  cattle  that  England  wanted,  the  little 
mills  were  destroyed,  and  the  young  men 
and  women  have  been  going  off  ever  since 
for  the  want  of  them,  till  the  commonest 
sight  in  Ireland  was  the  weeping  of  the 
desolate  mothers  at  the  stations  as  the  youth 
of  the  land  went  off  to  America."  I  know 
myself  a  place  of  which  the  description  was 
"a  church  and  a  chapel,  a  mill  and  a  castle, 
all  on  one  acre  of  ground."  Only  the  mill 
is  gone  now.  "I  am  getting  on  now,"  he 
continued,  "but,  thank  God,  I  have  six  sons. 
We  in  Ireland  must  work  out  this  problem 
for  ourselves.  We  know  they  will  try  to 
[97] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

stop  us  from  England,  but  perhaps  we  are 
better  so.  We  do  not  want  Ireland  to  be 
only  a  meat  farm  for  England,  but  we  do 
not  want  Englishmen  to  develop  Ireland  in- 
dustrially for  their  own  benefit  either,  mak- 
ing of  us  only  so  many  numbered  slaves  of 
English  capital.  We  know  the  difficulties 
in  our  way,  but  we  are  ready  to  face  them 
and  to  do  our  best  to  provide  a  good  living 
in  Ireland  for  those  who  are  born  here. 
But,"  he  ended,  as  he  took  my  hand  in  a 
strong  grip,  "do  not  you  desert  us.  Let  us 
always  be  able  to  feel  that  you  in  America 
will  stand  by  us.  If  you  do  not,  we  will 
still  go  on,  but  it  may  be  over  hard." 

I  promised. 

The  interference  is  sometimes  subtle.  Just 
now  they  are  very  anxious  in  Cork  about  the 
work  started  there  by  Henry  Ford.  I  sup- 
pose everybody  knows  that  while  Mr. 
Ford's  agreement  with  the  Cork  corpora- 
[98] 


The  Policy  of  Self-Reliance 

tion  was  before  Parliament,  to  which,  like 
everything  else  of  consequence  in  Ireland, 
it  had  to  go  for  confirmation,  every  effort, 
public  and  private,  was  made  to  dissuade 
Mr.  Ford  from  going  to  Cork  and  to  induce 
him  to  start  in  England.  Mr.  Ford  per- 
sisted. But  the  work  lags.  Some  in  Cork 
say  this  is  to  be  explained  by  the  difficulty 
of  getting  raw  materials  in,  others  by  the 
dislocation  of  the  Russian  market  for  trac- 
tors. Others  note,  with  uneasy  feelings,  that 
the  Englishman  who  is  in  charge  of  Mr. 
Ford's  business  has  just  been  knighted.  A 
kind  word  from  Mr.  Ford  would  be  very 
welcome  in  Cork. 

Some  years  ago  there  was  an  outbreak  of 
foot-and-mouth  disease  among  Irish  cattle. 
It  was  promptly  dealt  with  in  Ireland,  the 
markets  were  closed,  business  was  reduced 
to  zero.  A  time  came  when  in  Ireland  they 
considered  the  episode  was  over,  but  Eng- 
[99] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

lish  cattle  interests,  satisfied  to  have  posses- 
sion of  their  markets,  preferred  to  think 
otherwise.  In  these  circumstances  an  ad- 
venturous person  went  to  Hamburg  and  got 
a  large  order.  The  heads  of  the  cattle  trade 
were  delighted.  A  few  days  later,  after 
some  fresh  conversations  with  English  buy- 
ers, they  began  to  be  doubtful.  Another  few 
days  and  the  foot-and-mouth  plague  was  of- 
ficially at  an  end.  The  lesson  of  the  inci- 
dent was  that  the  Irish  cattle  trade  was  not 
only  subject  to  the  dispensations  of  Provi- 
dence but  also  to  the  influence  of  adverse 
cross  channel  influences.  The  co-operative 
principle  was  resorted  to,  and  a  packing 
house  was  started  at  Wexford,  whose  busi- 
ness now  amounts  to  over  a  million  dollars 
a  year.  Another  has  been  started  at  Dun- 
dalk,  another  at  Drogheda.  There  are 
whispers  that  the  American  beef  trust  has 
been  casting  sheep's  eyes  at  the  movement. 
[100] 


The  Policy  of  Self-Reliance 

Also   there   are   preparations   for  tannery 
treatment  of  the  hides. 

There  are  mountains  around  the  coast  of 
Ireland  upon  which  there  is  a  very  heavy 
rainfall.  Unless  there  is  some  exception  to 
the  law  of  gravitation,  this  water  must  come 
down  the  hillsides.  It  does  get  down  some- 
how, for  now  and  then  quantities  of  it  rise 
above  the  central  plain  and  flood  the  fields. 
If  it  could  be  caught  coming  down,  it  could 
be  turned  into  electricity,  a  great  deal  of 
electricity.  The  trouble  is,  they  tell  you  in 
Dublin,  that  this  water  which  falls  in  Ire- 
land is  controlled  in  England,  and  that  so 
long  as  this  is  true  efforts  to  change  its  fall- 
ing force  into  electricity  would  first  have  to 
pass  English  hostility  exerted  in  parliamen- 
tary committees.  Success  there,  vastly  im- 
probable, would  be  only  a  preliminary  to 
the  antagonism  of  local  landed  interests, 
also  English,  which  again  could  only  be 

[101] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

overcome  by  appeal  to  the  English  Parlia- 
ment, where  English  commercial  interests 
are  supreme  and  Irish  interests  count  for 
nothing.  That  Ireland,  deprived  of  the  use 
of  her  resources  in  electricity,  is  prevented, 
in  fact,  from  keeping  step  with  civilization 
does  not  worry  anyone  in  England,  any  more 
than  the  refusal  of  the  London-controlled 
Irish  railways  to  build  lines  to  the  Irish  coal 
fields.  All  such  trifles  are  covered  by  the 
lament  that  the  rest  of  Ireland  cannot  agree 
with  Carson,  who  will  not  agree  with  the 
Irish  as  long  as  his  English  paymasters  for- 
bid him.  Some  years  ago,  the  Galway 
farmers  on  the  west  side  of  Lough  Corrib, 
desiring  to  save  themselves  and  their  cattle  a 
day's  journey  around  the  lake  to  the  market 
town  on  the  east  side,  arranged  with  the 
local  councils  to  start  a  public  ferry,  to  op- 
erate across  a  neck  of  water  where  the  lake 
narrows.  Parliament's  permission  had  to  be 
[102] 


The  Policy  of  Self-Reliance 

sought,  and  the  project  failed  because  one  of 
the  members  for  London  was  opposed  to 
municipal  ownership.     Galway  town,  one 
would  think,  should  be  the  seat  of  a  con- 
siderable development  under  the  stimulus 
of  electricity  transmitted  from  the  hills,  but 
the  best  that  can  be  done  now,  by  patriots 
who  had  time  in  English  jails  to  discuss  such 
matters,  is  to  revive  all  the  little  mills  they 
can.     I  met  in  Dublin  a  professional  man 
on  his  way  to  Galway  from  prison  who  gave 
me  particulars  of  the  undertaking  he  is  go- 
ing in  for,  and  how  it  differs  from  several 
others   in   which   doctors,   professors,    and 
some  others  are  engaged.    They  have  a  sort 
of  local  Lloyds  at  Galway,  where  they  look 
over  the  field,  discuss  possibilities,  and  each 
adventures  according  to  his  taste  and  means. 
Meanwhile   the   excessive   rainfall   in   the 
hills  is  idle,  except  for  drowning  out  the 
potatoes. 

[103] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

While  the  war  was  still  not  half  over,  the 
British  Government  began  plans  for  recon- 
struction, of  which  one  phase  ran  to  the  sur- 
vey of  economic  resources.  The  study  has 
proceeded,  in  Sir  Edward  Carson's  phrase, 
as  if  Ireland  were  a  department.  What  is  in 
Ireland,  or  what  is  to  be  done  with  it,  it  may 
be  worth  England's  while  to  know,  but  the 
official  attitude  is  that  it  is  none  of  Ireland's 
business,  and  certain  Irish  protests  were  re- 
ceived with  something  like  shocked  amaze- 
ment. I  cannot  help  thinking  that  an  Irish- 
American  economic  commission,  tendering 
its  services  to  Dail  Eireann,  could  render 
quite  as  great  a  service  as  the  political  com- 
mission, which  woke  up  two  continents. 

In  the  meantime,  so  oppressively  con- 
scious are  they  of  the  limitations  placed 
upon  every  essay  in  Irish  development, 
whether  commercial,  industrial  or,  bound 
up  with  these,  social  and  even  political,  by 
[104] 


The  Policy  of  Self-Reliamce 

the  English  economic  encirclement,  that 
they  say  in  Dublin  and  Cork  the  coming  of 
one  cargo  of  American  coal  in  an  American 
ship  would  be  an  event  of  the  first  magni- 
tude. Others  who  are  trying  to  work  their 
way  out  of  the  maze  propose  that,  without 
too  meticulous  a  concern  for  forms  or  names 
or  sanctions,  business  representatives  of  Ire- 
land should  be  installed  in  America,  France, 
Spain,  Italy,  or  wherever  there  is  a  chance 
for  direct  trade,  or  for  profitable  trade, 
however  indirect.  There  is  hardly  a  doubt 
that  this  will  be  done,  done  by  and  for  Ire- 
land, and  not  through  England. 

What  the  thinking  men  see,  and  there  is 
plenty  of  hard  thinking  being  done,  is  that 
in  general  terms  industrial  development  in 
Ireland  will  be  upon  the  French  model,  not 
running  to  competition  in  bulk  commodities 
like  steel,  but  productive  of  articles  in 
which  Irish  brain  and  labor,  Irish  taste  and 
[105] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

touch  will  count  for  most.  Here,  it  is  seen, 
there  is  the  best  hope  of  catering  to  that  ex- 
port trade  which  will  permit  of  production 
on  a  scale  large  enough  to  be  profitable,  the 
first  essential  of  permanence. 

Need  I  add  that  for  a  market  for  such 
wares  they  look  hopefully  to  that  already 
great  Irish  market  which  is  beyond  the  seas, 
and  in  which  the  exercise  of  a  sentimental 
preference  in  little  things  would  have,  in 
the  aggregate,  so  great  and  beneficial  an  in- 
fluence? Already  there  is  a  "made  in  Ire- 
land" trade-mark  whose  rights  have  been 
successfully  defended  before  the  Supreme 
Court  of  the  United  States.  It  ought  not  to 
take  very  much  effort  to  induce  the  Irish  in 
America,  and  all  who  admire  the  spirit  of 
Ireland,  to  look  a  little  closer  if  they  see  it, 
or  to  ask  if  they  fail  to  see  it,  on  something 
they  might  be  disposed  to  buy. 

[106] 


VI 

FORCING  FRAMES  OF  FREEDOM 

THE  battle  of  Aughrim  was  fought  on 
the  land  of  one  O'Kelly,  who  had 
managed  somehow  to  keep  possession  when 
Cromwell  was  taking  the  land  of  Ireland 
away  from  the  Irish.  O'Kelly  was  a  "prac- 
tical" man.  He  believed  in  making  the  best 
of  his  farm  and  fought  shy  of  the  perils  to 
which  he  thought  a  plain  farmer  to  be  ex- 
posed by  participation  in  politics.  He  had 
a  model  farm,  to  whose  production  and  in- 
creasing fertility  he  gave  unceasing  and  in- 
telligent attention.  One  of  the  old  Irish 
bards  whose  chanted  story  of  the  William- 
ite  wars  has  come  down  to  us,  devoted  a 
rather  bitter  quatrain  to  the  worthy  man. 
O'Kelly's  fields,  he  sang,  are  now  all  that 
[107] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

his  heart  would  wish.  They  will  never  lack 
for  plentiful  manuring  from  this  time  for- 
ward. There  is  enough  of  the  rotting  car- 
casses of  men  and  of  horses  on  them  to  fer- 
tilize them  forever.  Och,  ochone — O'Kelly's 
well-tended  highly-producing  fields  were 
given  to  one  of  William's  soldiers. 

In  Ireland  they  have  long  recognized — 
as  where  is  it  not  recognized? — that  their 
ability  to  achieve  their  high  resolves  is  in 
direct  ratio  to  the  willingness  with  which 
they  bear  the  attendant  inconveniences  and 
to  their  determination  not  to  be  denied. 
When  Ireland  asked  Parliament  in  the  fam- 
ine years  for  an  order  to  close  the  ports  and 
feed  the  people  from  the  harvest — and  got 
a  coercion  act,  there  was  a  rebellion  and  the 
leaders  of  Ireland  were  deported  as  felons. 
The  seemingly  hopeless  demand  for  dises- 
tablishment of  an  alien  church  sustained  by 
levies  upon  a  people  it  did  not  serve  brought 
[  108] 


Forcing  Frames  of  Freedom 

into  existence  the  Fenians,  men  not  soft  in 
will.  The  movement,  springing  from  a 
peasant  tenantry,  by  which  the  Irish  land 
was  re-won,  was  probably  the  highest  single 
achievement  passive  resistance  has  to  its 
credit,  but  Michael  Davitt  did  not  begin 
that  movement  until  he  and  the  constitution- 
alist leaders  had  enlisted  the  support  of 
John  Devoy,  Matt  Harris  of  Ballinasloe, 
Patrick  Egan,  and  many  a  man  hidden  away 
in  quiet  corners  of  Ireland  whose  temper 
had  been  hardened  and  whose  fibre  had 
been  tested  in  the  earlier  struggle.  Today 
the  friendliest  thing  one  hears  said  about 
the  Maxwell  regime  is  that  in  putting 
Pearse  and  Connolly  and  the  others  out  of 
the  way  those  who  represented  the  English 
intention  to  rule  Ireland  as  a  conquered 
province  paid  the  highest  compliment  of 
which  they  were  capable  to  those  who  faced 
them  with  their  own  methods  of  force. 
[109] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

What  is  perfectly  patent  in  Ireland  now 
is  that,  if  the  elected  of  Irish  constituencies 
stay  away  from  Westminster,  set  up  a  gov- 
ernment of  their  own,  and  address  them- 
selves with  every  show  of  confidence  to  the 
development  of  Ireland  in  all  its  attributes 
as  a  nation,  despite  the  presence  in  Dublin 
of  a  foreign  government  backed  by  an  army 
of  occupation,  it  is  the  dispersion  all  over 
Ireland  of  men  who  have  been  confined 
with  them  in  English  prisons  upon  which 
they  must  and  do  depend  for  that  solidarity 
without  which  they  could  have  no  great 
hope  of  success.  "Labor  in  Ireland," 
George  Russell  (AE.)  explained  to  me, 
"has  advanced  by  leaps  and  bounds  since 
James  Connolly  gave  Labor  a  martyr."  Af- 
terwards I  stood  with  one  of  the  Labor 
leaders  in  Liberty  Hall  in  front  of  a  map 
on  which  the  progress  of  the  Labor  move- 
ment was  charted.  "It  seems  to  me,"  I  com- 
[110] 


Forcing  Frames  of  Freedom 

mented,  at  one  point  in  the  conversation, 
"that  there  is  in  all  this  much  that  fortifies 
the  nationalist  movement,  but  also,  given 
certain  conditions,  some  potential  of  disrup- 
tion. "  "Quite  true,"  was  the  reply.  "This 
is  a  Labor  movement,  a  necessary  thing,  as 
we  see  it.  When  Connolly  died,  there  were 
five  centers.  Now  there  are  eight  hundred. 
A  new  adhesion  has  been  telephoned  to  me 
since  we  have  been  talking.  We  must  ad- 
here to  our  definite  ideals,  and  we  do,  and 
doubtless  there  are  plenty  who  do  not  like 
them  or  like  us.  I  know  that  efforts  will  be 
made  to  turn  us  against  the  Dail.  For  the 
last  three  months  they  have  been  at  it.  But 
take  my  case.  I  was  not  in  the  Labor  ranks 
before  or  during  the  rising.  I  was  with  the 
Volunteers.  Afterwards  I  spent  six  months 
in  prison  with  DeValera.  Now  he  is  there 
and  I  am  here,  and  do  you  think  they  can 
make  a  cleavage  between  us?    There  are 

[mi 


The  Invincible  Irish 

literally  thousands  of  us  who,  in  English 
prisons  and  under  the  eyes  of  English  jail- 
ers, have  thought  out  and  talked  out  the 
present  problems  of  Ireland,  and  while 
some  are  in  our  movement  and  some  are  not, 
we  have  carried  to  all  Ireland  the  gospel 
learned  in  those  seminaries  which  they 
called  our  prisons,  where  they  thought  by 
offense  to  our  bodies  they  could  break  our 
spirit."  DeValera's  only  word  to  those  who 
lead  single  phases  of  the  movement  is, 
"Be  careful  only  lest  you  be  tempted  to  sub- 
stitute some  other  inspiration  for  that  of 
Ireland."  I  think  I  can  fairly  say  that  at 
Plunkett  House  itself,  and  in  the  published 
books  of  some  of  its  inmates,  I  have  found 
as  much  accurate  and  detailed  information 
touching  the  restrictive  influence  of  English 
commercial  domination  upon  Irish  devel- 
opment as  at  the  offices  of  the  Dail.  But 
there  are  no  martyrs  or  prisoners  behind 
[112] 


Forcing  Frames  of  Freedom 

Plunkett  House.  If  the  relief  they  seek  is 
obtained,  it  will  be  conceded  to  the  deter- 
mination of  the  others. 

George  Russell,  I  must  say,  I  found  with 
as  healthy  an  Irish  fury  in  his  breast  as  any 
of  them  all.  The  last  time  I  left  him  he 
was  bursting  with  scorn  of  the  Unionist 
delegation  which  had  gone  over  to  London 
to  warn  the  timid  English  of  the  baleful 
presence  in  Ireland  of  1,083  co-operative 
Soviets,  that  being  precisely  the  status  to 
which  the  Plunkett  co-operative  movement 
had  been  brought  by  over  thirty  years  of 
effort.  His  theory  was  that  these  gentlemen 
derived  their  inspiration  as  to  Irish  politics 
from  the  whiskey  and  soda  of  their  London 
clubs,  and  he  was  writing  an  article  to  say 
so.  It  was  Mr.  Russell  who  went  to  Eng- 
land, in  the  conscription  period,  to  explain 
to  English  Labor  that  conscription  in  Ire- 
land was  not  a  military  measure  by  first  in- 
[113] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

tention,  but  was  a  necessary  preliminary  to 
the  maintenance  of  the  conscription  policy 
after  the  war. 

There  seems  to  be  excellent  reason  for  al- 
lowing it  to  be  understood  that  there  is  a 
reservoir  of  firmness  in  the  country.  Lloyd 
George  has  indeed  condemned  the  War 
Office  regime  in  Ireland  in  the  early  years 
of  the  war,1  but  his  condemnation  did  not 
prevent  its  destroying  Ireland's  reputation 
as  "the  one  bright  spot"  nor  the  relegation 
of  Home  Rule  to  the  Greek  Kalends.  I  am 
informed,  by  one  whom  I  believe,  which  is 
to  say  by  one  anybody  would  believe,  a  man 
outside  Sinn  Fein  and  the  Parliamentary 

aMr.  Lloyd  George,  answering  Mr.  John  Redmond  in  the 
House  of  Commons  (Oct.  18,  1916),  said:  "I  wish  I  could 
give  answer  to  my  hon.  friend's  criticisms;  but  some  of  the 
stupidities  (which  sometimes  almost  look  like  malignities) 
which  were  perpetrated  at  the  beginning  of  recruiting  in 
Ireland  are  beyond  belief.  I  do  not  know  who  was  re- 
sponsible. I  remember  that  I  was  perfectly  appalled  at  the 
methods  adopted  to  try  and  induce  the  Irish  people  to  join 
the  ranks.  It  really  looked  as  if  someone  were  discoura- 
ging them." 

[114] 


Forcing  Frames  of  Freedom 

Party,  that  at  one  of  those  times  when  there 
was  reason  to  think  a  policy  of  stark  repres- 
sion was  imminent,  a  decent  English  general 
got  wind  at  the  War  Office  of  an  unauthor- 
ized plan  which  contemplated  bloody  busi- 
ness in  Ireland,  that  he  hurried  to  Dublin, 
accused  some  of  the  high  officials,  and  on 
their  denial  confronted  them  with  their 
own  signatures.  He  spoiled  that  plot,  but 
who  knows  when  there  will  be  another,  with 
all  the  war  machines  lying  about,  and  with, 
perhaps,  need  to  distract  the  attention  of 
England  from  its  own  troubles?  And  how 
much  would  it  have  availed  Ireland,  if, 
after  the  thing  then  contemplated  had  been 
done,  there  had  been  official  disclaimers  of 
responsibility  made  with  much  unction  in 
Parliament?  The  representative  of  a  Lon- 
don paper  called  upon  an  Irish  lady  a  few 
hours  before  I  did.  He  told  her  that  Eng- 
land has  now  become  stronger  than  ever, 
[115] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

that  she  was  no  longer  under  obligation  to 
anyone,  that  she  meant  to  do  about  Ireland 
just  what  she  chose,  and  that  interference 
would  not  be  brooked  from  any  quarter. 
This  gentleman  was  making  a  study  of  Ire- 
land just  after  the  visit  of  Messrs.  Walsh, 
Dunne  and  Ryan.  I  asked  her  whether  any- 
thing was  likely  to  be  useful  to  Ireland  in 
presence  of  this  attitude,  very  general  in 
England,  except  to  oppose  to  it  an  equally 
consistent  attitude  resting  upon  a  rounded 
out  conception  of  Irish  character.  She  an- 
swered that  she  saw  nothing  else  for  it. 

The  opinion  of  some  of  the  older  men 
among  the  Nationalists  I  saw  was  that  the 
sturdy  spirits  who  stood  behind  Davitt  had 
the  great  advantage  of  being  years  removed 
from  the  period  of  their  early  stress, 
and  were  therefore  not  exposed  to  the  errors 
of  heady  youth,  and  not  apt  to  respond  so 
easily  to  artful  provocation.  There  is  no 
[116] 


Forcing  Frames  of  Freedom 

apprehension  on  this  score  among  the 
younger  men  themselves,  who  feel  that  dis- 
cipline and  other  rigors  must  count  for 
something.  Still,  it  is  of  the  nature  of  po- 
litical movements  carried  on  as  they  must 
be  in  Ireland  against  ever  threatening  force 
that  the  ship  must  sail  very  close  to  the  wind. 
I  asked  a  well-known  magazine  writer, 
while  in  Paris,  to  come  to  Ireland  with  me. 
He  declined,  for  the  reason  that  he  would 
expect  to  lose  interest  in  everything  else. 
"All  I  want  to  know,"  he  said,  "is  whether 
the  Irish  can  go  along  without  fighting. 
Their  best  chance  to  win  now  is  to  refuse  to 
be  drawn,  but  as  far  as  I  have  been  able  to 
judge  them,  that  is  the  hardest  thing  for 
them  to  do."  There  is  one  factor  he  prob- 
ably does  not  count  upon.  The  Irish  can 
laugh.     If  it  were  not  for  that  they  might 

indeed  go  mad. 

*    #    * 

[117] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

The  Labor  movement,  as  I  have  said,  is 
making  rapid  headway.  It  is  boldly,  skil- 
fully and  honestly  led.  How  honestly,  may 
be  inferred  from  the  fact  that  when  the  wife 
of  one  official  accepted  a  present  all  the 
others  resigned  in  protest.  It  goes  without 
saying  that  the  movement  is  influenced  by 
the  trend  of  the  commotions  in  the  rest  of 
Europe,  but  as  capitalism  in  its  baneful  im- 
perialistic aspect  has  not  made  much  prog- 
ress in  Ireland,  the  task  that  commands  the 
best  efforts  of  Labor's  intelligence  is  chiefly 
constructive  in  character.  One  of  the  classes 
calling  for  helpful  guidance  is  that  which 
includes  great  numbers  of  farm  laborers. 
They  are,  in  a  very  real  sense,  the  agricul- 
turists, with  all  the  term  involves  in  knowl- 
edge of  the  problems  of  the  soil  and  the 
variations  of  season.  The  farmer  rests  a 
sort  of  aristocratic  claim  upon  the  owner- 
ship of  land  and  the  raising  of  cattle.  There 
[118] 


Forcing  Frames  of  "Freedom 

is  all  the  rigidity  of  caste  in  his  relation  to 
the  laborer.  But  the  laborer  is  not  content, 
and  is  going  to  be  still  less  content,  with 
the  estimate  of  his  value  this  relation  in- 
spires. 

He  is  therefore  headed  straight  for  co- 
operative association  as  the  sane  and  sound 
way  of  demonstrating  his  earning  power. 
Some  years  ago  there  was  rather  strong  and 
general  protest  against  a  system  of  eleven 
months'  leases,  under  which  much  land  that 
might  be  used  for  tillage  is  kept  under  grass 
for  cattle  owned  by  townspeople  and  others. 
One  who  has  been  in  all  the  movements  of 
the  last  thirty  years  predicted  in  a  talk  I 
had  with  him  that  the  next  concentration 
would  be  brought  to  bear  against  this  sys- 
tem, and  that  a  corollary  would  be  the  ac- 
quisition of  lands  from  whose  cultivation 
the  labor  agriculturists  might  make  the  larg- 
est incomes  their  skill  could  command.  In 
[119] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

the  cases  of  many  of  the  other  unions,  the 
evident  intention  is  to  form  groups  strong 
enough  to  enable  the  members  to  take  the 
wage  scale  out  of  the  realm  of  haphazard, 
to  catch  up,  so  to  say,  both  as  to  wages  and 
other  conditions  now  considered  elemen- 
tary, with  the  practice  in  other  countries. 
Something  of  the  kind  was  surely  needed; 
of  that  the  sudden  upsurging  of  hundreds  of 
new  unions  all  over  the  country  is  sufficient 
proof.  The  leaders  see,  however,  that  the 
remedies  to  be  sought  are  not  precisely  those 
which  might  be  had  in  a  highly  industrial- 
ized community,  and  they  are  sensible  that 
one  function  of  the  labor  union  in  Ireland 
will  be  to  advance  the  social  education  of 
increasing  numbers  of  young  men  and 
women,  and  that  another  will  be  to  encour- 
age co-operation  in  all  the  ways  in  which 
it  can  be  used  to  make  whatever  earnings 
are  available  go  farther  than  they  did. 
[120] 


Forcing  Frames  of  Freedom 

Naturally,  with  the  Bolsheviki  bugaboo  so 
present  to  all  minds,  there  is  a  good  deal  of 
trepidation  over  the  rather  purple  language 
the  organizers  sometimes  permit  themselves. 
But  speech,  while  an  excellent  and  often  an 
attractive  thing,  is  not  now  regarded  as  so 
vital  a  matter  as  it  was  once  thought  to  be. 
Thus,  while  some  of  the  older  clergy  stop 
their  ears,  some  of  the  younger  ones  get  into 
personal  contact  with  the  Labor  leaders  and 
find  they  are  excellent,  well-meaning  men, 
working  with  truly  apostolic  spirit  for  the 
alleviation  of  evil  conditions  which  give 
rise  to  manifold  human  ills.  The  associa- 
tion is  exhilarating  to  a  young  and  zealous 
priest,  who  is  sure  to  make  good  his  own 
contribution  to  whatever  work  is  done  in 
common.  In  the  North,  within  the  sphere 
of  Belfast  influence,  Labor  adheres  to  its 
English  and  Scotch  affiliations.  If  it  ever 
looks  southward  it  will  find  a  welcome,  but 
[121] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

there  is  not  at  present  any  urging.  There 
are  many  who  think,  they  do  not  know  quite 
why,  that  Labor  will  solve  the  Ulster  diffi- 
culty. One  gets  a  glimpse  of  the  possible 
justice  of  this  view  when  he  hears  of  in- 
stance after  instance  of  southern  Irishmen, 
fugitives  from  British  law,  going  confident- 
ly and  securely  to  the  Orangemen  of  the 
North  for  refuge  which  is  never  denied. 
That  is  another  thing  the  humor  of  which 
the  Irish  always  see,  the  invaders  never. 


[122] 


VII 
WHITECAPS  ON  A  RISING  SEA 

"But  some  say  the  day  will  come  when  the  Dord  Fiann 
will  be  sounded  three  times,  and  that  at  the  sound  of 
it  the  Fianna  will  rise  up  as  strong  and  well  as  ever  they 
were.  And  there  are  some  who  say  Finn,  son  of  Cumhal, 
has  been  on  the  earth  now  and  again  since  the  old  times, 
in  the  shape  of  one  of  the  heroes  of  Ireland." — "Gods  and 
Fighting  Men,"  Lady  Gregory. 


THE  visit  to  Ireland  of  the  three  dele- 
gates from  America,  Mr.  Walsh,  Mr. 
Dunne  and  Mr.  Ryan,  arrested  the  atten- 
tion of  the  English  press  by  reason  of  the 
freedom  with  which  they  spoke  of  things 
that  in  England  are  not  considered  proper 
subjects  for  Irish  discussion.  Freedom  from 
foreign  invasion  is  a  holy  thing — in  Eng- 
land. Resistance  to  military  occupation  is 
the  sign  of  a  proud  and  noble  people — 
in  Belgium.  Permeation  of  a  country's 
[123] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

institutions  by  an  alien  and  hostile  neigh- 
bor is  to  be  resisted  to  the  death — in 
France.  Americans  are  encouraged  to 
speak  freely  about  all  such  matters,  pro- 
vided they  are  careful  about  the  application 
and  provided  they  stay  at  home.  It  is  a 
breach  of  the  conventions  to  mention  these 
topics  at  all  in  connection  with  Ireland,  and 
the  real  objection  of  England  to  the  be- 
havior of  the  delegates  arose  from  the  feel- 
ing that  they  had  done  something  shock- 
ingly rude  in  using  the  same  formulas  in 
Ireland  they  had  been  encouraged  to  adopt 
at  home.  The  effect  produced  in  Ireland 
itself  is  to  be  traced  to  a  different,  but  still 
abnormal,  condition  of  mass  mentality.  In 
Ireland  self-effacement  is  the  standard  of 
conduct.  It  is  practised  by  the  leaders;  it 
is  the  daily  habit  of  the  people.  All  forms 
of  nationalist  expression  are  forbidden  by 
the  men  who  govern  for  England,  and  if  at- 
[124] 


Whitecaps  on  a  Rising  Sea 

tempted  are  repressed  under  threat  or  by  ap- 
plication of  force.  I  never  saw  a  Volunteer 
in  Ireland,  never  heard  the  Soldiers'  Song, 
never  heard  a  speech.  But  I  have  heard 
man  after  man  and  woman  after  woman  ex- 
plain how  meetings  had  been  prevented  or 
broken  up.  I  was  chatting  with  Mrs.  Skef- 
fington  one  day  when  the  door  opened  and 
in  came  Countess  Markievicz  with  a  joyous 
explanation  of  how  she  had  fooled  the  po- 
lice by  holding  a  meeting  that  had  been  for- 
bidden, but  not  just  where  it  was  announced, 
and  had  got  away  by  motor  car  over  an  un- 
watched  road.  Mrs.  Skeffington  herself  had 
appointments  cancelled  by  the  police  or  the 
military  almost  every  other  day.  I  have  al- 
ready described  how  Father  O'Flanagan 
"put  one  over,"  as  we  say.  The  Irish  lead- 
ers are  always  going  to  meetings,  but  they 
never  speak.  The  people  had  become  ac- 
customed to  this  regime  of  suppression.  And 
[125] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

then  these  three  gentlemen  came  among 
them  and  made  speeches.  The  effect  was 
astounding.  All  the  time  they  were  there 
they  did  not  call  a  meeting,  but  everywhere 
they  went  a  meeting  came  to  them.  They 
spoke,  and  they  were  not  interfered  with. 
Their  progress  was  only  comparable  to  that 
of  the  prophets  of  old.  I  have  been  told 
that  all  of  them — and  they  are  all  case- 
hardened  to  crowds — were  profoundly 
moved  by  the  sight  of  the  masses  of  men 
and  women  who  came  to  welcome  them 
back  from  Limerick.  They  might  speak; 
what  a  marvel!  They  spoke  of  elemental 
things;  what  a  triumph!  It  was  his  failure 
to  foresee  this  unbelievable  thing  that 
brought  down  upon  Lloyd  George's  devoted 
head  the  storm  of  English  indignation. 
They  never  knew  how  popular  they  were, 
but  I  came  across  some  queer  indications  of 
it.  A  butcher  quietly  put  away  a  joint  he 
[126] 


Whitecaps  on  a  Rising  Sea 

was  selling.  "That  will  never  do  for  them," 
he  said,  as  he  reached  for  a  better  one.  Shop 
after  shop  broke  all  its  rules  when  their 
comfort  was  in  question,  and  taxi  patrons 
had  to  wait  with  what  patience  they  could 
for  drivers  engaged  even  remotely  in  their 
service.    It  was  a  tremendous  time. 

Only  a  few  weeks  before,  a  Catholic  prel- 
ate from  one  of  the  Dominions,  who  in  his 
home  sphere  had  caught  something  of  the 
glamor  of  the  imperialist  pretension,  had 
slipped  into  Ireland  unobserved.  When  he 
came  out  he  reported  that  the  people  were 
being  driven  like  poor  cattle,  that  if  he  had 
stayed  a  month  he  would  be  either  mad  or 
in  jail,  and  that  he  had  come  away  disap- 
pointed and  disillusioned. 

It  is  under  these  conditions  that  the  men 
and  women  work  who  have  been  called  to 
leadership.  There  was  a  taste  of  their  ef- 
ficiency in  the  way  the  American  trip  was 
[127] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

stage  managed,  amazingly  well  according 
to  the  British  correspondents,  but  only  on 
rare  occasions  is  there  any  indication  of  how 
hard  they  may  be  working.  What  is  more 
to  the  point,  it  is  hard  for  the  public  to 
form  a  just  estimate  of  their  qualities. 

Mr.  DeValera,  for  example,  really  came 
to  his  present  eminence  on  the  unanimous 
endorsation  of  the  contingent  in  prison.  His 
reputation  as  a  speaker  and  organizer  was 
just  well  enough  established  to  make  it  easy 
for  the  people  at  large  to  ratify  the  choice. 
His  first  act  was  to  begin  to  organize  the 
agencies  available  to  him  as  thoroughly  as 
if  there  was  no  other  government  nearer 
than  London,  and  to  do  it  without  letting 
the  Castle  know  what  was  done.  He  works 
so  hard  that  he  outrages  all  conventions  con- 
cerning the  taking  of  nourishment.  If  he 
has  to  attend  to  too  much  detail  himself  it 
is  because  he  cannot  always  find  new  men 
[128] 


Whitecaps  on  a  Rising  Sea 

ready  to  take  the  places  of  helpers  in  whom 
the  police  show  too  much  interest.  He  sees 
an  immense  number  of  people  in  the  course 
of  a  week,  and  just  works  and  smiles.  Eng- 
lish writers  express  mistrust  of  the  good 
humor  of  the  Irishmen  they  see.  It  some- 
times almost  looks  as  though  the  Sinn  Fein- 
ers  might  be  laughing  at  them.  DeValera's 
smile  is  as  disarming  as  any.  When  he 
chooses  to  be  serious  there  is  a  very  engag- 
ing simplicity  about  his  speech.  He  speaks 
simply  because  he  sees  things  clearly.  Any- 
one can  see  that,  and  everyone  does.  One 
advantage,  for  him,  in  the  present  situation 
is  that  he  is  spared  the  trouble  of  frequently 
explaining.  The  people  leave  it  to  him,  for 
indeed  he  is  greatly  trusted  and  profoundly 
admired. 

Arthur  Griffith  is  what  some  of  the  op- 
ponents of  Sinn  Fein  call  its  "brains  carrier." 
As  becomes  a  working  journalist,  he  is  a 
[129] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

storehouse  of  information.  He  likes  his 
controversy  hot,  and  gives  and  takes  in  that 
sense.  Like  Brougham  and  his  colleagues 
of  the  early  Edinburgh  Review,  who  "culti- 
vated genius  on  a  little  oatmeal,"  Griffith 
was  long  supposed  to  be  able  to  run  a  paper 
without  capital  and  live  without  personal 
expense.  Therefore  his  marriage  was  as 
great  a  shock  to  his  friends  as  the  stoppage 
of  the  sun  was  to  Joshua's.  But  in  twenty 
years  he  has  familiarized  a  people  with  his 
ideas.  He  has  made  the  paper  Nationality 
pay.  The  best  story  I  have  heard  of  him 
was  told  me  by  a  professor  of  French,  one 
of  whose  pupils,  a  young  namesake  of  mine, 
had  written  a  thesis  which,  in  the  profes- 
sor's views,  fairly  reeked  of  Nationality. 
The  French  visitor  who  read  the  thesis,  and 
to  whom  Griffith  was  a  god  unknown,  was 
enchanted  by  the  essay,  which  opened  to 
him  new  vistas  of  thought,  a  very  surprising 
[130] 


Whitecaps  on  a  Rising  Sea 

and  wholly  delightful  experience.  He  was 
tremendously  complimentary  to  the  happy 
student.  I  found  very  bright  business  men 
full  of  confidence  that  anything  in  the  eco- 
nomic field  that  needs  to  be  done  in  and  for 
Ireland  can  be  done  if  Griffith  will  put  his 
name  down  as  approving. 

John  MacNeill  is  another  remarkably 
well  informed  man,  very  delightful  in 
conversation,  one  of  those  Northerners  who 
know  how  to  go  to  the  heart  of  a  situation 
and  to  make  the  most  of  a  political  oppor- 
tunity. It  is  a  sin  and  a  shame,  however, 
that  the  disturbed  state  of  the  country  makes 
it  necessary  for  him  to  withdraw  for  an  hour 
from  his  work  as  a  historian.  He  has  a  long 
family  of  small  children,  and  when  he  goes 
away  on  his  jail  vacation  he  misses  their 
company.  However,  they  have  his  brother 
James,  who  came  home  to  enjoy  life  after  a 
Jong  career  in  the  Indian  service,  and  who 
[131] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

apologizes  to  his  friends  for  the  untoward 
condition  of  some  of  his  much-loved  flower 
beds  on  the  plea  that  he  took  too  much 
pleasure  out  of  the  company  of  John's  chil- 
dren. Bless  him!  This  interest  in  other 
people's  children  is  a  fad  around  Dublin, 
anyway.  A  woman  told  me  it  was  not  until 
a  good  four  months  after  the  rising  that  they 
were  able  to  satisfy  themselves  with  the  pro- 
vision made  for  the  orphans  left  by  those 
who  had  fallen. 

Almost  any  day  one  can  see  Count 
Plunkett  on  an  outside  car  starting  off  for 
the  Roscommon  train  to  intervene  in  a  labor 
dispute  or  to  comfort  some  constituent  who 
has  come  into  collision  with  the  forces  of 
Empire.  The  Count  and  his  lady,  who  ex- 
perienced a  lot  of  very  ungentle  handling 
by  the  English  prison  authorities,  have 
adopted  Lord  Morley's  formula  that  to  be, 
to  do  and  to  do  without  are  real  social  de- 
[132] 


Whitecaps  on  a  Rising  Sea 

siderata,  especially  for  patriots.  Almost 
any  day,  too,  in  the  warm  weather  one  who 
enters  the  courtyard  of  the  National  Uni- 
versity just  before  one  o'clock  can  see  and 
hear  Dr.  Douglas  Hyde  and  a  score  of  his 
pupils  under  the  trees  carrying  on  an  ani- 
mated discussion  in  Irish.  If  this  fails,  one 
can  go  to  St.  Stephen's  Green  at  the  fall  of 
night  and  see  another  teacher  and  his  class 
of  young  men  and  women  perfecting  their 
freedom  in  the  ancient  tongue  while  walk- 
ing and  chatting  among  the  beauty  spots  of 
the  Green.  Nor  does  one  escape  it  by  going 
indoors.  I  felt  very  humble  one  night 
among  twenty  persons  of  both  sexes  who  all 
spoke  Irish,  and  another  evening  with  six  of 
them.  Among  these  were  three  or  four  of 
the  younger  leaders  who  get  hardly  any  pub- 
licity at  all,  but  who  are  working  all  the 
time.  The  Dail  Eireann  had  two  good  men 
in  Paris,  J.  T.  O'Kelly  and  George  Gavan 

[133] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

Duffy,  both  of  whom  wear  the  gold  ring 
pin  which  means  that  when  one  wearer 
meets  another  they  are  pledged  to  talk  Irish. 
This  did  not  prevent  their  headquarters  in 
the  Grand  Hotel  being  the  center  to  which 
drifted  Egyptians,  South  Africans  and  many 
of  the  other  delegations  from  little  countries 
in  search  of  cheer  or  comfort  or  advice,  for 
be  it  known  that  Paris  wore  a  grey  and  for- 
bidding look  to  the  score  or  more  of  delega- 
tions representing  non-powerful  states,  who 
were  encouraged  by  the  Big  Four  to  chafe  in 
idleness  in  their  own  quarters  until  the  spirit 
moved  them  to  go  home  unheard  or  uncon- 
sidered. They  all  much  admired  the  way 
the  Irish  and  their  American  associates 
obtained  a  share  of  the  limelight  for  Ire- 
land. Maybe  they  thought  the  little  gold 
pins  account  for  it,  but  it  was  not  that.  It 
was  brains  and  ability  and  that  curious  Irish 
quality  of  sympathy  they  possess  which 
[1341  " 


Whitecaps  on  a  Rising  Sea 

brought  to  them  friendly  visitors  from  all 
over  Europe  and  from  the  best  informed 
quarters  in  Paris,  and  put  them  in  position 
to  show  others  how  to  do  what  they  did  so 
well  themselves. 

Whether  to  Douglas  Hyde  the  praise  be 
given — I  am  sure  he  would  be  the  first  to 
disclaim  it — or  whether  boys  will  be  boys, 
the  fact  remains  that  the  young  men  of  the 
University  spread  themselves  along  the 
highest  cornice  of  the  noble  new  university 
building  the  day  the  American  delegates 
were  there.  The  truth  is  that  in  the  student 
body  Irish  Ireland  is  very  conscious  of  itself 
and  of  the  times  in  which  its  youth  is  passed. 
Having  learned  how  many  of  the  boys  of 
Pearse's  school  had  followed  the  school- 
master into  the  streets  of  Dublin  the  week 
of  the  Rising,  I  ventured  to  put  to  a  woman 
devoted  to  the  cause,  and  who  knew  the  cir- 
cumstances, this  question:  "How  do  you 
[135] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

account  for  it  that  boys  whose  parents  sent 
them  to  school  found  themselves  in  the 
midst  of  war?"  I  confess  her  answer  floored 
me.  "Why  do  you  suppose  we  sent  our  boys 
to  that  school?  Why  do  you  suppose  I  sent 
my  boy?  (He  was  present  at  the  conversa- 
tion) I  wanted  him  to  learn  what  it  is  to  be 
Irish  and  to  fight  for  Ireland."  Somebody 
had  told  me  that  if  all  the  men  were  carried 
off  the  women  would  take  up  their  work. 
Anybody  who  wants  to  may  disbelieve  that. 
I  don't.  I  got  into  an  argument  with  a  little 
wisp  of  a  university  woman  as  to  what 
might  happen  if  Mr.  Wilson  should  con- 
trive in  Paris  to  have  offers  made  to  Ireland 
compromising  the  full  Wilsonian  doctrine. 
"And  who  is  Mr.  Wilson,"  asked  she,  "that 
he  should  propose  for  us,  as  good  enough 
for  us,  the  half  of  what  he  has  fought  for 
and  got  for  others  who  do  not  deserve  it 
near  as  much  as  we?"  The  word,  as  M. 
[136] 


Whitecaps  on  a  Rising  Sea 

Clemenceau  says,  is  to  President  Wilson. 
One  more  Lost  Leader?  Ah  well,  one  more 
or  less, — what  is  that  in  Ireland? 

Going  up  to  Paris  from  Rouen  one  day, 
I  met  in  the  train  an  American  colonel,  who 
had  been  spending  his  leave  in  Ireland.  His 
ancestors  had  come  from  there  a  hundred 
and  fifty  years  ago.  In  Dublin,  at  one  of 
the  closed  hotels,  the  proprietor  had  said, 
"You  are  American,  aren't  you?"  and  found 
him  a  room.  At  another  place,  when  he 
registered,  he  was  told  that  his  name  was  a 
familiar  one  around  there.  "You  have  your 
choice  of  the  hotel  and  the  club,"  he  was 
told;  "I  am  the  manager  of  both,  and  I 
recommend  the  club."  He  sat  next  day 
and  watched  the  people  on  parade,  and  con- 
cluded they  were  the  most  courteous,  con- 
siderate, best  set  up  men  and  women  he  had 
seen  in  Europe,  and  that  the  respect  shown 
for  women  by  the  poorest  dressed  men  was 
[137] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

the  equal  of  anything  he  had  ever  witnessed 
in  a  drawing  room.  All  he  saw  afterwards 
confirmed  these  impressions,  and  he  came 
away  feeling  there  were  no  people  like 
them.  In  London  he  met  many  fine  up- 
standing fellows  and  many  beautiful  wom- 
en, whereat  he  was  greatly  pleased  also. 
Must  there  really  be  conflict?  He  hoped 
not.  As  we  parted  he  said:  "I  wish  my 
father  had  been  spared  to  be  home  when  I 
get  there.  We  were  four  brothers,  and  he 
used  to  tell  us  the  way  we  were  going  we 
would  all  have  violent  ends.  Well,  I  am 
the  last.  One  went  at  San  Juan  Hill,  one 
the  night  Madero  was  murdered,  one  in  an 
accident.  I  have  just  been  through  the  Ar- 
gonne  and  Lorraine  and  I  haven't  a  scratch. 
I  wish  I  could  report  to  him.  Still,"  he 
continued,  "I  don't  know.  If  there's  going 
to  be  any  rough  handling  of  these  Irish 
people  I've  seen  there  may  be  a  chance  of  it 
[138] 


Whitecaps  on  a  Rising  Sea 

yet."  The  worst  of  soldiering  is  that  it  de- 
velops habits  of  direct  thinking  that  are 
very  unsettling  to  the  painstaking  investi- 
gator mind. 


[139] 


VIII 
THE  IRISH  VALIANT  WOMAN 

THE  taxicab  was  waiting  at  the  gate  of 
St.  Enda's  School.  "Come  here, 
now,"  said  Mrs.  Pearse,  "and  I'll  show  you 
where  I  said  good-bye  to  my  boys."  We 
walked  a  few  steps,  and  she  pointed  to  a 
spot  in  the  road.  "There's  where  they  left 
me ;  my  two  fine  boys.  And  I  said  to  them, 
'Good-bye,  my  darlings,  and  if  I  don't  see 
you  again  in  this  world,  I  will  in  the  next' " 
I  asked  her  if  she  had  seen  them  again.  "I 
never  saw  Padraic,"  she  said,  "but  I  saw 
Willie.  They  let  me  see  him  the  night  be- 
fore his  execution.  I  asked  him  did  he  see 
Padraic.  *I  did  not,  mother,'  he  said.  They 
said  I  was  to  see  him,  and  they  took  me  out, 
but  I  only  heard  the  firing,  and  I'm  sure  it 
[140] 


The  Irish  Valiant  Woman 

was  he.'  Well,  thank  God,  my  faith  was 
strong.  'Never  mind,  Willie/  I  said, 
'You'll  soon  be  with  him,  and  when  you  see 
him,  tell  him  mother  will  be  braver  than 
ever.'    My  two  fine  boys!" 

"A  nation  is  what  its  women  make  its 
men." 

The  mother  of  the  Pearses  has  re-opened 
the  school.  She  thinks  it  ought  not  to  per- 
ish. Some  months  ago  there  was  an  incident 
on  the  mountain  near  by.  The  military, 
for  want  of  a  better  recourse,  occupied  the 
school,  remaining  there  several  weeks,  and 
the  children  had  to  be  transferred  else- 
where. The  men  were  rather  heavy,  and  the 
gymnasium  suffered,  and  in  other  ways  the 
change  was  not  good  for  the  fine  old  house 
under  whose  hospitable  roof  Robert  Emmet 
and  Sarah  Curran  used  to  meet.  (Her 
father's  house,  the  Priory,  is  just  across  the 
road.)  Padraic  Pearse's  study  is  kept 
[141] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

closed.  The  officers  did  not  allow  it  to  be 
entered,  and  did  not  enter  it  themselves. 
When  they  all  went  away,  at  last,  the  chil- 
dren came  back.  About  the  same  time  the 
present  headmaster  was  released  from  the 
English  prison  in  which  he  had  been  kept, 
with  so  many  others,  for  many  months. 
Among  the  pupils  are  two  little  sons  of 
James  Larkin,  the  meteor  leader  of  the 
Dublin  strike  of  1913.  There  are  some  odd 
bits  of  sculpture  which  prove  that  Willie 
Pearse  was  a  true  artist,  and  there  are 
many  convincing  evidences  that  Padraic, 
the  teacher,  lived  as  he  wrote,  under  the  in- 
spiration of  the  Man  of  Sorrows  and  "in 
the  hard  service  of  the  Poor  Old  Woman," 
Kathleen  the  daughter  of  Houlihan. 

Mrs.   Concannon,  the  scholarly  biogra- 
pher of  St.  Columba,  entering  a  new  field, 
has    just    published    a    volume    of    beau- 
tiful  studies   of   the   Women   of   'Ninety- 
[142] 


The  Irish  Valiant  Woman 

Eight.  One  reads  it  with  an  irrepressible 
feeling  that  the  years  between  count  for 
nothing,  with  a  realizing  sense  that  the 
spirit  of  the  women  is  the  same  now  as  it 
was  then,  and  with  apprehension  that  will 
not  down  that  we  may  be  on  the  eve  of 
tragedy  as  great  "In  many  a  forgotten 
grave,  from  Antrim  to  Wexford,"  writes 
Mrs.  Concannon,  "lies  the  dust  of  the 
women  who  died  victims  of  the  yeomanry 
and  the  military,  let  loose  on  the  country 
to  goad  its  manhood  into  a  rising."  It  has 
not  quite  come  to  that  yet,  but  who  knows 
that  it  will  not?  It  has  gone  so  far  that 
no  house  is  safe  from  raid  and  search  at  any 
hour  of  the  day  or  night  and  that  whole 
countrysides  are  subjected  to  intimate  tyr- 
anny by  police  and  military.  Indignities 
have  been  suffered  by  women,  young  and 
old,  in  this  process.  And  not  wholly  in 
meekness  has  it  been  borne.  What  can  be 
[143] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

argued  from  the  killing  of  one  of  the  little 
tyrants  in  open  day  on  a  crowded  street,  with 
none  to  name  the  murderer,  none  to  raise 
the  hue  and  cry,  unless  it  be  that  the  com- 
munity by  its  very  silence  has  rendered  a 
verdict?  Where  force  is  substituted  for  the 
forms  of  law,  as  against  the  people,  is  it  so 
very  strange  that  the  example  is  followed? 
"There  are  two  sorts  of  prophets,"  com- 
mented Curran  in  a  great  trial,  "one  that 
derives  its  sources  from  real  or  fancied  in- 
spiration, yet  are  sometimes  mistaken;  the 
other  class  composed  of  persons  who 
prophesy  what  they  are  determined  to  bring 
about  themselves."  Prophets  of  this  latter 
sort  were  very  potent  in  1798,  They  are 
very  potent  now.  And  we  have  the  recent 
declaration  of  the  London  Morning  Post, 
organ  of  the  class  which  has  always  sus- 
tained their  enterprises,  that  "the  Govern- 
ment will  eventually  be  faced  with  the 
[144] 


The  Irish  Valiant  Woman 

choice  between  giving  Ireland  complete  in- 
dependence and  re-conquering  that  country. 
That  hour  is  fast  approaching."  (July  8, 
1919.)  By  what  means,  one  cannot  help 
wondering,  is  the  hour  to  be  advanced? 
With  all  the  troops  there  are  in  Ireland, 
it  might  come  very  suddenly.  And  yet  it 
is  quite  impossible  to  convey  to  any  who 
have  not  been  in  contact  with  them,  with 
what  serene  belief  in  the  triumph  of  the 
right  the  Irish  people  await  the  forcing  of 
the  issue. 

And  this  is  as  true  of  the  women  as  of 
the  men.  Indeed,  I  doubt  whether  there  is 
a  parallel  anywhere  for  the  new  and  beau- 
tiful relation  between  men  and  women 
which  in  Ireland  the  presence  of  crisis  has 
brought  into  existence.  They  are  comrades, 
co-workers,  taking  counsel  together,  equals 
in  a  sense  foreign  to  the  conception  of  most 
advocates  of  equality  between  the  sexes, 
[14S] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

for  theirs  is  an  equality  of  which  not  ad- 
vantage but  sacrifice  is  the  test,  and  to  which 
the  road  lies  not  through  advancement  but 
through  suffering  and  effacement.  One 
hears  many  stories  illustrative  of  the  way 
the  women  have  played  their  part. 

When  James  Connolly  lay  wounded  and 
guarded  he  contrived  with  a  stub  of  a  pen- 
cil, writing  on  his  knee  and  under  the  sheet, 
to  write  what  he  thought  he  ought.  All 
that  would  have  been  labor  in  vain  but  for 
his  brave  little  daughter,  who  took  the  mes- 
sage under  the  eyes  of  the  guards,  and  car- 
ried it  to  its  destination.  She  is  now  one 
of  the  organizers  in  the  Labor  Movement, 
and  a  very  competent  one. 

There  are  two  young  women,  sisters,  who 
were  in  the  Rising.  One  of  them  stuck  to 
her  work  at  the  Post  Office  until  the  Thurs- 
day, when  she  was  told  to  get  away,  as  the 
struggle  had  become  hopeless,  and  to  take 
[146] 


The  Irish  Valiant  Woman 

an  important  message  with  her.  She  passed 
the  military  guard  safely,  and  a  few  days 
later  did  her  best  to  convince  the  police  that 
it  was  she,  and  not  her  sister,  that  was 
"wanted."  They  refused  to  take  her  and 
did  take  the  sister.  The  message  was  de- 
livered. 

On  the  day  the  Rising  began,  two  other 
sisters  took  a  train  from  a  western  town. 
The  train  stopped  a  few  miles  from  the 
starting  place  and  word  came  that  "they 
were  up  in  Dublin."  Later  the  train  pro- 
ceeded, reaching  Dublin  at  nightfall.  The 
sisters  sat  all  day  without  a  word,  went 
straight  from  the  train  to  the  Volunteers' 
headquarters,  got  their  orders,  and  returned 
to  their  home  next  day. 

Another  woman  carried  an  order  across 
Ireland,  returned,  spent  the  week  within 
the  lines,  and  got  safely  away  at  the  end. 

Of  another,  it  was  told  me  that  when 
[147] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

the  executions  began,  she  would  sit  up  far 
into  the  night  talking  to  the  photographs 
of  the  men  who  were  gone  and  that  towards 
the  end  her  resolution  failed,  but  with  the 
beginning  of  the  period  of  wholesale  ar- 
rests her  determination  returned  and  she 
has  never  since  faltered. 

In  a  noble  passage  in  his  speech  at  Madi- 
son Square  Garden,  which  most  of  the  news- 
papers failed  to  report,  Mr.  Frank  P. 
Walsh  told  of  the  emotion  he  had  experi- 
enced as  the  remains  of  Edith  Cavell  were 
carried  through  Trafalgar  Square,  and  of 
how  there  flashed  across  his  mind  the  mem- 
ory of  the  white  face  of  Mrs.  Tom  Clarke. 
Mrs.  Clarke  is  in  prison,  not  for  anything 
she  has  done,  but  by  way  of  recognition 
that  her  spirit  is  true  to  the  memory  of  her 
husband,  whose  body  rests  in  Maxwell's 
quicklime.  John  McBride  is  there,  too,  and 
his  wife,  who  was  Maud  Gonne,  has  been 
[148] 


The  Irish  Valiant  Woman 

in  prison  and  has  come  out  unshaken.  So 
one  might  go  through  a  long  list  of  familiar 
names  of  heroic  women,  and  a  longer  list 
of  women  whose  names  are  not  known  at 
all.  For  one  who  has  suffered  in  person, 
thousands  of  women  have  taken  up  patient- 
ly and  uncomplainingly  the  burden  im- 
posed by  the  imprisonment  of  the  bread- 
winner. And  who  knows  how  many  more 
are  placidly  awaiting  the  hour  when  it  may 
be  their  turn  to  suffer? 

Sometimes  it  has  seemed  that  not  enough 
has  been  made  of  the  story  of  Anne  Devlin, 
the  woman  who  could  have  betrayed  Robert 
Emmet.  The  military  prodded  her  with 
bayonets.  Then  they  hanged  her  till  she 
was  half  dead.  Then  she  was  offered  £500. 
Then  they  put  her  in  solitary  confinement. 
Then  they  brought  her  into  the  courtyard 
where  Emmet  was  walking  and  she  re- 
fused to  recognize  him  and  contrived  that 
[149] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

he  should  not  speak  to  her.  She  was  taken, 
the  day  after  Emmet's  execution,  past  the 
place,  and  the  cart  was  stopped  that  she 
might  look  upon  his  blood.  Sent  back  to 
prison,  she  was  subjected  to  mental  torture 
by  a  prison  official,  as  was  afterwards  dis- 
closed, in  a  way  that  was  "shocking  to  hu- 
manity, and  exceeds  credibility.  He  drives, 
through  exasperation,  the  mind  to  mad- 
ness." She  came  out  broken  in  health  and 
crippled  in  limb,  but  she  had  never  flinched. 

It  all  seems  very  far  away,  as  one  reads  it 
in  a  book,  but  it  seems  marvelously  close 
again  as  one  hears  the  quiet  comment  of 
the  women  of  Dublin  while  the  tanks  and 
armored  cars  are  speeding  through  the 
streets,  the  airplanes  circling  overhead,  the 
machine  guns  crossing  the  city  with  soldiers 
in  steel  helmets  marching  behind  with  bay- 
onets fixed. 

There  is  a  word  that  ought  not  to  go  un- 
[150] 


The  Irish  Valiant  Woman 

said,  about  an  incident  that  has  to  do  with 
the  Irish  woman.  Much  is  made,  by  those 
who  have  nothing  better  to  say,  about  the 
exclusion  of  American  sailors  from  Cork. 
It  is  not  necessary  to  follow  the  stories  which 
had  it  that  some  sailors  behaved  badly  and 
were  set  upon.  That  might  have  happened 
in  Paris,  in  Nice,  in  London.  But  if  it 
did,  it  would  have  been  only  an  incident. 
The  great  point  is  that  what  was  always 
happening  in  Paris  and  London,  without 
effective  protest  from  either  the  people  or 
the  authorities  representing  the  people, 
would  not  be  tolerated  in  Ireland  at  all. 
Paris  was  cynically  indifferent  to  the  im- 
molation of  its  womanhood.  London  had 
sunk  to  a  depth  where  the  greatest  doctors 
threw  off  all  pretence  that  virtue  was  a 
matter  for  concern.  Ireland  takes  another 
view,  and  will  suffer  no  disparagement  of 
the  virtue  of  its  women.  In  the  Abbey 
[151] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

Theatre  in  Dublin,  they  have  in  a  frame  the 
notice  sent  by  the  censor  of  plays  when 
Synge's  "Playboy  of  the  Western  World" 
was  first  being  rehearsed.  He  counselled 
the  excision  of  the  words  "the  loosed  kharki 
cutthroats"  because  he  thought  it  dangerous 
to  bring  into  disrepute  the  services  of  the 
Crown.  Solemnly  the  censor  wrote  it  and 
as  solemnly  the  Irish  Theatre  framed  the 
gem  of  unconscious  humor.  The  British 
Admiralty  did  a  wise  and  sensible  thing 
when,  recognizing  the  essential  difference 
between  the  Irish  way  and  some  other  ways 
of  looking  at  these  problems,  it  took  meas- 
ures accordingly.  The  motive  has  been 
misrepresented,  but  the  great  fact  remains 
that  the  Irish  view  of  Irish  womanhood  pre- 
vailed. It  would  have  prevailed  anyhow. 
It  always  will. 


[152] 


IX 
WHAT  CAN  BE  DONE  TO  HELP 

THE  first  newspaper  I  saw  on  return- 
ing from  Ireland  had  an  account  of  a 
speech  in  the  course  of  which  Senator  John 
Sharp  Williams  expressed  some  impatience 
with  his  colleagues  for  making  too  much  of 
the  Irish  issue,  with  a  rather  disparaging 
reference  to  the  number  of  Irish-Ameri- 
can votes.  It  did  occur  to  my  mind  that  the 
Southern  Senator  owes  to  these  same  votes 
a  little  something,  for  he  has  had,  and  has 
used  discerningly,  a  great  opportunity  dur- 
ing seven  years  of  Democratic  party  rule 
made  possible,  in  no  small  degree,  by  just 
such  votes.  But  what  the  reading  of  the 
paragraph  brought  back  to  me,  with  sudden 
rush  of  pleasant  memory,  was  a  day  I  spent, 
[153] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

some  years  ago,  in  New  Orleans.  There, 
in  the  museum  in  the  old  Cabildo,  I  had 
sat  down  beside  the  death  mask  of  a  great 
general.  A  man  came  up,  taking  his  glass- 
es from  his  waistcoat  pocket,  and  asked,  "Is 
this  the  Napoleon  mask?"  "No,"  said  I, 
"it  is  Grant."  "Oh,"  he  said,  replacing  the 
spectacles  in  his  pocket,  "I  don't  know  as 
I'm  so  much  interested  in  Grant."  And 
then  he  very  obligingly  showed  me  over  the 
place,  and  I  learned,  as  we  walked  and 
talked,  that  in  his  youth  he  had  lived  for 
weeks  in  the  building,  as  one  of  the  armed 
guard  of  the  Louisiana  judiciary,  which 
continued  to  function  in  this  old  building 
while  the  judges  who  came  with  the  carpet 
baggers  from  the  North,  upheld  by  the  tri- 
umphant Federal  military,  endeavored  to 
affirm  their  authority  behind  the  walls  of 
another  famous  building  a  few  hundred 
yards  away.  Now  I  felt  quite  sure  that 
[154] 


What  can  be  Done  to  Help 

Senator  Williams  must  be  politically  and 
intellectually  kin  to  my  courteous  New  Or- 
leans host,  and  it  seemed  to  me  that  if  he 
at  all  realized  how  the  young  men  of  the 
Dail  Eireann  are  struggling  to  do,  in  all  es- 
sentials, what  was  done  in  the  South  in  his 
young  days,  he  could  not  hold  any  bitter- 
ness in  his  heart  against  them  or  display 
impatience  with  American  friends  of  their 
cause.  It  seemed  to  me  then,  as  it  seems  to 
me  now,  that  he  must  be  one  among  a  great 
many  who  do  not  sense  the  reality  of  the 
Irish  position;  from  which  it  follows  that 
the  main  business  of  those  of  us  who  feel 
keenly  upon  the  subject  ought  to  be  to  make 
the  mere  truth  of  the  position  more  widely 
and  yet  more  widely  known. 

In  the  same  way,  I  have  noted  how  super- 
ficial are  the  many  letters,  finding  fault  with 
the  Irish,  and  brimming  over  with  unlovely 
bitterness,  with  which  our  papers  have  been 
[155] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

filled.  First  there  was  a  chorus  about  the 
alleged  inhumanity  of  Irishmen  in  presence 
of  the  Lusitania  disaster,  then  a  chorus 
about  the  hostility  to  American  sailors  in 
Cork,  then  a  chorus  about  the  booing  of  the 
President.  I  met  in  Ireland  the  National- 
ist Irishman  who  held  the  coroner's  inquest 
over  the  Lusitania  affair.  His  conduct  was 
vigorous  enough,  as  we  all  remember,  and 
yet  there  is  in  all  Ireland  no  more  forcible 
critic  of  England's  bad  faith.  Mr.  De 
Valera  has  given  the  lie  to  the  statement 
about  inhumanity,  adding  that  in  Ireland 
they  have  not  yet  produced  men  of  the  Bara- 
long  breed.  The  affair  of  the  sailors  in 
Cork  I  have  already  discussed.  I  would 
prefer,  with  Mr.  DeValera,  that  the  dis- 
appointment, deeply  felt,  over  the  failure 
of  the  Peace  Conference  to  realize  the  ex- 
pectations built  upon  the  President's 
speeches,  might  be  manifested  in  ways  that 
[156] 


What  can  be  Done  to  Help 

better  reflect  the  sincerity  of  the  emotion. 
But  what  must  impress,  and  what  must  dis- 
appoint, anyone  with  the  slightest  concep- 
tion of  what  perils  impend  in  Ireland,  is 
the  absence,  in  all  these  letters,  and  in  the 
attitude  of  the  papers  in  which  they  were 
printed,  of  any  outcropping  of  that  vein 
from  whose  depths  the  riches  of  American 
political  feeling  have  always  been  drawn. 
The  inherent  right  of  people  to  their  free- 
dom, the  foundation  of  government  upon 
the  consent  of  the  governed,  never  a  hint 
of  that.     Therefore,  it  is  of  the  first  im- 
portance that  those  who  value  liberty  for 
its  own  sake  be  guided  to  an  understanding 
of  the  imminent  danger  there  is  that  another 
people,  who  have  greatly  and  nobly  risked 
their  all  in  asserting  their  freedom,  may 
be  made  victims  of  a  re-conquest  while  the 
world  looks  on  with  indifference.    I  seem  to 
remember   that   in   the   oration   in   which 
[157] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

George  William  Curtis  described  the  first 
appearance  of  Wendell  Phillips,  he  told 
how,  in  Faneuil  Hall,  resolutions  had  been 
offered  which  made  it  appear  that  Love- 
joy,  giving  his  life  for  a  fugitive  slave, 
"died  as  the  fool  dieth,"  and  that  Phillips 
would  have  none  of  it  and  forced  his  way  to 
the  platform  to  invoke  the  memory  of  Ames 
and  Adams  in  protest.  Pearse,  too,  and 
Plunkett,  Connolly  and  McDonagh,  Ashe 
and  Coleman,  yes,  and  Redmond  and  Ket- 
tle, they  would  have  us  believe,  "died  as 
the  fool  dieth,"  in  dying  that  Ireland  might 
live,  soul  free,  shaking  off  oppression.  The 
comment  upon  all  this  oftenest  to  be  noted 
is  the  sneer  of  some  great  newspaper. 
There  is  even  something  like  a  competition 
in  the  game  of  defamation. 

It  is  not  a  worthy  spectacle.    Those  who 
thus  advertise  their  inability  to  recognize, 
even  from  afar  off,  obvious  manifestations 
[158] 


What  can  be  Done  to  Help 

of  nobility  of  soul,  deserve,  did  they  but 
know  it,  the  pity  of  men  for  whom  freedom 
is  something  more  than  a  fetish. 

For,  let  us  not  be  deceived  about  it,  when 
a  disarmed  people  of  four  millions  assert 
their  independence  under  the  frown  of  sixty 
thousand  rifle  muzzles,  representing  the 
entire  power  of  forty  millions,  it  is  not  a 
mean  but  a  heroic  thing  they  do.  Such  re- 
solves are  not  taken  until  after  all  less  des- 
perate recourses  have  failed,  as  in  Ireland's 
case  they  had  failed.  And  just  as  the  "shot 
heard  round  the  world"  has  been  and  will 
ever  be  an  inspiration,  so  will  the  first  shot 
fired,  if  it  ever  is  fired,  in  the  re-conquest 
of  Ireland,  bring  execration  to  those  who 
would  rule  by  force  and  humiliation  to 
those  who,  believing  in  liberty  and  ardently 
cherishing  their  own,  have  refused  to  see 
what  the  broad  light  of  day  reveals. 

For  those  who  do  not  seek  to  disguise 
[159] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

their  concern,  particularly  for  such  as  are 
of  the  blood,  there  is  more  to  do  than  wait 
helplessly  for  the  signal  of  destruction  to 
sound.  They  have  some  right  to  assume  that 
at  a  time  when  every  other  nationality  in 
Europe  has  been  constituted  a  state,  the  old- 
est conscious  nation  of  them  all  cannot  be 
dragooned  back  into  subjection  in  the  full 
view  of  an  unapproving  world.  Rather 
should  they  cast  about  to  see  whether  they 
cannot,  in  all  proper  ways  open  to  Ameri- 
cans mindful  of  their  responsibilities,  hold 
up  the  hands  of  those  who  have  entered 
upon  this  great  adventure.  "Ireland  will  be 
hopelessly  handicapped,"  writes  Sir  Horace 
Plunkett  (June  28,  1919),  "in  the  world- 
wide struggle  of  nations  for  existence  if  she 
has  to  face  the  necessity  of  adjusting  her 
social  and  economic  machinery  to  the  con- 
ditions of  a  new  era  under  a  Government 
over  which  her  people  have  no  control, 

[160] 


What  can  be  Done  to  Help 

and  which  has  no  authority  over  them  save 
what  it  derives  from  force."  Ireland  has 
to  face  that  necessity,  and  has  to  face  it  with 
the  foreboding  that,  somewhere  in  the 
world,  perhaps  in  Mexico,  perhaps  else- 
where, a  screen  may  at  any  time  be  erected 
behind  which  the  rigors  of  ever  present 
force  may  be  applied  against  Ireland,  with 
relative  freedom  from  outside  attention. 
Even  as  things  are  now,  with  English  pol- 
icy favoring  Irish  emigration,  Ireland  has 
to  contrive  to  keep  her  people  at  home; 
with  English  policy  discouraging  Irish  in- 
dustry, Ireland  has  to  provide  work  for 
these  men  and  women ;  with  English  inter- 
ests operating  to  prevent  the  development 
of  Ireland's  resources,  Ireland  has  to  find 
ways  of  using  these  resources  for  her  own 
advantage ;  with  English  directors  discrimi- 
nating against  Ireland  in  the  control  of  the 
Irish  transportation  agencies,  Ireland  has 
[161] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

to  devise  means  of  averting  economic  ruin ; 
with  Irish  savings  subject  to  the  whim  of 
English  bankers,  Ireland  has  to  find  the 
money  to  finance  undertakings  that  are 
vital  to  her  prosperity;  with  English  mer- 
chant marine  laws  and  mercantile  combi- 
nations throttling  every  effort  to  build  up 
direct  trade  relations  between  Ireland  and 
other  countries,  Ireland  has  to  contrive  that 
goods  made  in  Ireland  shall  find  their  way 
into  foreign  markets  to  be  there  exchanged 
for  foreign  wares.  The  men  who  have  to 
arrange  all  this  must  do  it  with  the  sword 
poised  to  strike  their  country  and  the  prison 
doors  open  before  them  at  every  step  they 
take  and  at  every  turn  they  make. 

To  think  that  in  the  country  of  Samuel 
Adams  and  Gouverneur  Morris,  it  is  possi- 
ble for  such  men  to  be  spat  upon  in  the  daily 
press  which  is  assumed  to  reflect  the  ideals 
of  the  people!  But,  it  is  said,  they  seek  the 
[162] 


What  can  be  Done  to  Help 

unattainable.  Even  were  that  so,  where 
the  right  of  a  people  to  order  its  own  life  is 
in  issue,  what  other  quest  would  be  so  well 
worth  while? 

If  I  were  asked,  as  I  have  many  times 
asked  myself,  What  can  be  done  to  help  by 
those  who  would  like  to  be  helpful?  the  an- 
swer would  have  to  be  sought,  where  it  can 
readily  be  found,  in  the  catalogue  of  im- 
perative requirements. 

We  can  give  the  Irish  people  assurance 
that  their  ideal  is  one  with  which  we  are 
familiar,  and  which  we  prize. 

We  can  extend  a  kindly  welcome  to  their 
chosen  spokesmen,  and  give  attentive  ear  to 
the  speakers  and  writers  who  have  the 
power  to  transmit  to  us  a  true  view  of  Irish 
civilization  as  Irish  men  and  women  live 
and  feel  and  know  it. 

We  can  display  the  sympathetic  interest 
of  a  conscious  democracy  in  the  experiment 
[163] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

of  establishing  a  new  industrial  organiza- 
tion under  enlightened  dispensations  for 
the  welfare  of  Labor. 

We  can  be  of  practical  assistance  in  en- 
suring the  success  of  bureaus  designed  to 
make  known  to  ourselves  the  merits  of  Irish 
articles  of  commerce. 

We  can  encourage  students  who  come 
here  to  learn  that  they  may  return  to  teach 
American  methods  of  business  organiza- 
tion. 

We  can  make  it  a  rule  to  include  among 
our  Christmas  presents  at  least  one  object, 
bearing  the  Irish  trade-mark,  into  which 
have  gone  something  of  Celtic  taste  and 
something  of  Irish  handicraft. 

We  can  tender  the  services  of  highly 
trained  engineers,  successful  captains  of  in- 
dustry, experts  in  salesmanship,  masters  of 
the  problem  of  transportation,  wise  coun- 
sellors in  finance,  hardy  adventurers  in  com- 
[164] 


What  can  be  Done  to  Help 

merce,  to  assist  them  to  a  knowledge  of  their 
opportunities  and  of  how  to  make  the  best 
use  of  their  resources. 

We  can  help  them  to  charter  ships  and  to 
arrange  for  cargoes. 

Seeing  that  when  they  would  collect 
money  for  themselves  they  are  pounced 
upon  by  the  military  and  police,  we  can 
provide  them,  in  reason,  in  exchange  for 
certificates  of  indebtedness,  with  such  sums 
as  any  Government  faced  by  their  problems 
of  development  might  similarly  obtain  with 
a  view  to  activating  the  processes. 

We  can  do  much,  and  almost  without  ef- 
fort, to  lift  the  pall  beneath  which  it  might 
be  calculated  their  aspiration  would  be 
smothered  in  the  despair  that  succeeds  to 
helplessness  if  they  were  left  unaided  and 
uncheered. 

Thus  we  can  keep  the  urge  towards  free- 
dom in  motion  through  the  period  in  which 
[165] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

it  might  be  expected  to  exhaust  its  potential. 
Why  take  the  trouble?  Because  it  was 
not  a  vain  thing  nor  a  little  thing  the  most 
American  of  Americans  had  in  mind  when 
he  called  upon  his  countrymen  to  "highly 
resolve  that  government  of  the  people,  by 
the  people  and  for  the  people  shall  not  per- 
ish from  the  earth/'  and  because  in  Ireland 
alone,  among  the  earth's  white  peoples, 
that  sublime  aspiration  remains  to  be  striv- 
en for  and  is  still  to  be  concededly  attained. 
God  grant  that  soon  it  will  be. 


[166] 


APPENDIX 

IRELAND'S  RIGHT  TO  FREEDOM 

MARTIN  CONBOY 


IRELAND'S  RIGHT  TO  FREEDOM 

Speech  Delivered  at  the  Banquet  of  the  Friendly  Sons 
of  St   Patrick,  in  New  York,  March  17,  1919,  by  Martin 

CONBOY. 

THERE  has  never  been  an  anniversary 
celebration  in  the  entire  history  of 
this  ancient  organization  when  the  speaker 
addressed  himself  to  his  subject  with  a 
deeper  feeling  of  responsibility,  but  at  the 
same  time  with  less  apprehension  and 
greater  certainty  than  on  the  present  occa- 
sion, for  to-night  we  celebrate  the  triumph 
of  all  those  fundamental  and  essential  truths 
of  civilization  that  the  Friendly  Sons  of  St. 
Patrick  have  advocated  since  the  founda- 
tion of  the  Society. 

The    responsibility   is    involved    in    the 
careful  and  appropriate  application  of  the 
principles  that  have  triumphed,  to  the  con- 
ditions to  which  they  apply.  The  assurance 
[169] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

and  certainty  are  justified  by  the  fact  that 
once  these  conditions  are  defined,  the  appli- 
cation follows  of  necessity  from  the  essen- 
tial character  of  the  principles. 

The  old  order  has  passed,  giving  way  to 
the  new.  Military  power  developed  by  the 
highest  efficiency  to  the  most  formidable 
proportions  has  been  destroyed  by  the  irre- 
sistible courage  and  determination  of  free 
peoples.  The  oppressed  of  the  earth  have 
been  championed  by  the  common  justice 
of  humanity.  The  world,  throughout  its 
length  and  breadth,  in  all  the  places  where 
men  abide,  has  been  made  safe  for  democ- 
racy. The  secure  era  of  peace  is  now  to  suc- 
ceed the  eras  of  the  past  with  their  appre- 
hensive periods  of  war.  It  remains  to  make 
sure  only  that  there  shall  be  no  cloud  to  mar 
the  dawn  of  the  new  day,  no  exception  to 
conflict  with  the  common  purposes  of  men 
all  over  the  world. 

[170] 


Ireland's  Right  to  Freedom 

It  is  true  that  there  are  still  portions  of 
the  globe  where  the  presence  of  an  armed 
soldiery  evidences  the  supremacy  of  the 
military  power  and  the  subordination  of 
civil  authority.  The  western  frontier  of  Ger- 
many is  occupied  by  troops  of  our  own 
army,  but  the  condition  is  only  a  temporary 
one  that  will  cease  when  peace  has  been  for- 
mally established.  In  the  frozen  reaches  of 
Northern  Russia  men  of  our  armies  and  of 
the  armies  of  our  co-belligerants  are  strug- 
gling with  the  forces  of  disorder  to  bring 
peace  to  a  distraught  and  unhappy  land,  to 
quell  the  menace  of  a  spreading  social  revo- 
lution that  threatens  the  structure  of  civil- 
ization. 

The  former  condition  is  a  necessary  con- 
sequence of  a  danger  that  until  recently  was 
a  continuing  menace  to  the  peace  and  the 
lives  of  nations.  The  latter  is  just  as  neces- 
sary a  preventive  of  a  danger  that  threatens 

[171] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

the  peace  of  the  future.  Each  is  a  condition 
that  is  not  only  justifiable  but  necessary  for 
the  safety  of  world  democracy;  the  insur- 
ing of  a  lasting  peace  is  not  possible  of  ac- 
complishment unless  each  menace  is  de- 
stroyed and  the  apprehension  of  mankind 
removed. 

But  there  is  one  other  place  where  the 
presence  of  an  army  is  not  justified  by  either 
of  these  considerations.  No  threat  of  Bol- 
shevism comes  nor  can  come  from  it,  for  the 
character  and  genius  of  its  people  reject  and 
abhor  the  idea  of  social  and  political  an- 
archy. The  peace  of  Europe  is  not  threat- 
ened there  by  any  attempt  at  world  domin- 
ion, for  all  that  that  people  want  is  their 
own  country.  The  soldier  in  Ireland  is  an 
indefensible  anachronism.  He  is  the  sole 
survivor  of  a  day  that  is  gone,  gone  we  hope 
never  to  return.  The  soldier  in  Germany 
and  in  Russia  has  his  proper  and  necessary 
[172] 


Ireland's  Right  to  Freedom 

place  in  the  present  scheme  of  things,  the 
soldier  in  Ireland  is  a  contradiction  of  the 
gospel  of  democracy,  a  denial  of  the  truth 
that  is  on  every  man's  lips  and  in  every 
man's  heart.  The  world  will  be  made  safe 
for  democracy  if  the  purpose  of  the  soldier 
in  Germany  and  Russia  is  accomplished, 
the  world  will  be  made  unsafe  for  democ- 
racy if  the  purpose  of  the  soldier  in  Ireland 
is  accomplished.  Other  small  nations  will 
achieve  self-determination  if  the  soldier 
stands  guard  against  the  aggressions  of  the 
Hun  and  the  Bolshevik,  one  small  nation 
can  never  achieve  self-determination  so 
long  as  a  British  army  throttles  the  expres- 
sion of  that  determination  in  Ireland.  A 
lasting  peace  may  be  accomplished  if  its 
bases  are  good  faith  and  justice  and  the  ac- 
ceptance of  the  principle  of  self-determina- 
tion, but  a  lasting  peace  cannot  be  achieved 
if  these  fundamental  truths  are  denied  ap- 
[173] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

plication  in  one  spot  on  the  earth,  especially, 
for  us  who  are  here,  if  that  one  spot  is  Ire- 
land. 

The  Irish  situation  at  this  time  is  not  in 
principle  or  fact  a  domestic  but  a  world 
question,  because  the  principles  that  apply 
to  it  and  by  which  it  is  to  be  solved  are  those 
principles  that  have  been  accepted  by  every 
nation  that  fought  with  us  and  against  us  in 
the  war  so  recently  concluded,  and  because 
the  elements  of  that  situation  are  conditions 
that  were  present  in  other  places,  the  rem- 
edy for  which  by  the  same  uncontested  and 
universally  accepted  principles  is  now  be- 
ing applied  by  an  international  concert  of 
action. 

To  reach  any  different  conclusion  would 
be  to  convict  the  nations  of  the  earth  of  the 
most  consummate  hypocrisy  and  to  brand 
the  greatest  statesman  of  the  age,  the  spokes- 
man of  them  all,  with  unparalleled  decep- 
t  174  ] 


Ireland's  Right  to  Freedom 

tion.  When  Woodrow  Wilson  announced 
what  henceforth  were  to  be  the  cardinal 
points  by  which  the  rights  and  obligations 
of  nations  should  be  determined,  marking 
a  new  era  in  civilization,  he  did  not  suggest 
that  Ireland  was  to  be  excepted  from  an 
otherwise  universal  application.  When 
England  accepted  these  principles  she  ac- 
cepted them  without  qualification.  If  there 
is  any  man  in  this  room  to-night  who  would 
deny  the  right  of  self-determination  to  Ire- 
land, I  cannot  imagine,  in  the  language  of 
our  President,  how  he  can  live  and  not  live 
in  the  atmosphere  of  the  world,  I  cannot 
imagine  how  he  can  live  and  not  be  in  con- 
tact with  the  events  of  these  times,  for  he  is 
out  of  harmony  with  the  new  conception  of 
freedom  declared  by  our  great  President, 
accepted,  aye,  acclaimed,  by  the  statesmen 
of  the  world,  and  purchased  with  the  treas- 
ure of  America  and  the  blood  of  her  brave 
[175] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

sons,  who  perished  on  the  battlefields  of 
France,  that  the  sacred  fire  of  democracy 
might  burn  everywhere  wherever  there  was 
an  altar  of  civilization. 

And  if  all  the  rest  of  the  world  should 
fail  in  the  present  test  to  conform  action  to 
utterance,  and  to  subordinate  expediency  to 
principle,  the  United  States  is  committed, 
in  accordance  with  the  oft-repeated  declara- 
tion of  the  President,  to  insistence  upon  the 
right  and  condemnation  of  the  wrong. 
Never  was  an  undertaking  more  solemnly 
avowed. 

"We  accepted,"  said  President  Wilson  in 
his  memorable  speech  of  September  27th, 
"we  accepted  the  issues  of  the  war  as  facts, 
not  as  any  group  of  men  here  or  elsewhere 
had  defined  them,  and  we  can  accept  no 
outcome  which  does  not  squarely  meet  and 
settle  them.  Those  issues  are:  Shall  the 
military  power  of  any  nation  or  group  of 
[176] 


Ireland's  Right  to  Freedom 

nations  be  suffered  to  determine  the  for- 
tunes of  peoples  over  whom  they  have  no 
right  to  rule  except  the  right  of  force? 
Shall  strong  nations  be  free  to  wrong  weak 
nations  and  make  them  subject  to  their  pur- 
pose and  interests?  Shall  peoples  be  ruled 
and  dominated,  even  in  their  own  internal 
affairs,  by  arbitrary  and  irresponsible  force 
or  by  their  own  will  and  choice?  Shall 
there  be  a  common  standard  of  right  and 
privilege  for  all  peoples  and  nations  or 
shall  the  strong  do  as  they  will  and  the  weak 
suffer  without  redress?  Shall  the  assertion 
of  right  be  haphazard  and  by  casual  alli- 
ance or  shall  there  be  a  common  concert  to 
oblige  the  observance  of  common  rights? 

"No  man,  no  group  of  men,  chose  these  to 
be  the  issues  of  the  struggle.  They  are  the 
issues  of  it,  and  they  must  be  settled  by  no 
arrangement  or  compromise  or  adjustment 
of  interests,  but  definitely  and  once  for  all, 
[177] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

and  with  a  full  and  unequivocal  acceptance 
of  the  principle  that  the  interest  of  the 
weakest  is  as  sacred  as  the  interest  of  the 
strongest. 

"This  is  what  we  mean  when  we  speak  of 
a  permanent  peace,  if  we  speak  sincerely, 
intelligently  and  with  a  real  knowledge  and 
comprehension  of  the  matter  we  deal  with." 

On  November  11,  1918,  an  armistice  was 
arranged  in  which  our  enemies  specifically 
accepted  the  President's  principles,  includ- 
ing the  fourteen  points,  together  with  the 
principles  just  quoted  from  the  speech  of 
September  27th.  Our  associates  in  the  war 
likewise  specifically  accepted  these  prin- 
ciples with  the  single  reservation  for  discus- 
sion of  the  point  relating  to  the  freedom  of 
the  seas,  a  point  that,  in  view  of  the  turn  the 
negotiations  at  the  Peace  Conference  have 
taken,  has,  according  to  the  President,  be- 
come academic.  And  now  the  associated 
[178] 


Ireland's  Right  to  Freedom 

delegates  are  in  conference  in  Paris 
avowedly  endeavoring  to  build  out  of  these 
acceptances  the  permanent  peace  of  which 
they  are  the  foundation. 

At  the  second  plenary  session  of  the 
Peace  Conference,  held  on  January  25, 
1919,  with  Premier  Clemenceau  in  the 
Chair,  President  Wilson  in  the  course  of 
his  address  to  the  delegates  made  the  fol- 
lowing explanation  of  his  purpose  in  attend- 
ing the  conference: 

"\ye  *  *  *  are  here  to  see  that  every 
people  in  the  world  shall  choose  its  own 
masters  and  govern  its  own  destinies,  not 
as  we  wish,  but  as  they  wish." 

No  language  can  be  more  explicit  than 
this. 

In  this  Conference  there  are  doubtless 
some  national  matters  which  take  preced- 
ence over  others.  It  is  perhaps  premature, 
therefore,  to  complain  that  the  name  of 
[179] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

Ireland  has  not  so  far  been  mentioned  by 
the  conferees.  This  situation  rightly  under- 
stood affords  no  cause  for  dismay,  no  reason 
for  discouragement,  for  the  work  of  the 
conferees  cannot  conclude  except  in  failure 
unless  Ireland's  case  is  heard.  Ireland's 
time  must  surely  come,  her  case  must  even- 
tually be  reached  on  the  calendar  of  that 
court  which  cannot  conclude  its  labors  and 
adjourn  until  that  necessary  business  is 
transacted.  No  one  wishes  to  hamper  the 
Conference  in  its  work  or  embarrass  it  in  its 
deliberations  by  insisting  upon  a  premature 
consideration  of  Ireland's  case.  Whenever 
the  time  arrives  for  the  presentation  of  that 
case,  can  there  be  any  question  but  that  it 
will  have  a  steadfast  and  sturdy  champion 
in  the  man  who  in  his  historical  writings 
has  expressed  himself  in  no  measured  terms 
regarding  British  rule  in  Ireland  and  has 
championed  the  cause  of  small  nations 
[180] 


Ireland's  Right  to  Freedom 

everywhere?  What  evidence  have  we  upon 
which  to  base  the  expectation  that  Ireland 
will  be  betrayed,  when  all  the  proof  incon- 
testably  supports  the  assertion  that  what 
is  humanely  possible  for  him  to  achieve  for 
Ireland,  he  will  be  eager  and  proud  to 
achieve? 

The  case  of  Ireland  must  be  heard  by  the 
conferees,  for  the  permanent  peace  of  jus- 
tice cannot  be  established  so  long  as  the 
present  condition  continues  in  Ireland.  No 
man  of  peace  can  shut  his  eyes  to  the  fact 
that  because  the  Irish  have  demanded  their 
liberty  under  the  new  law,  a  state  of  war 
exists  in  Ireland.  The  Irish  have  never 
assented  to  be  members  of  the  British  Em- 
pire. Even  the  Irish  union,  unlike  the 
union  between  England  and  Scotland,  was 
not  the  voluntary  act  of  two  free  peoples, 
each  seeking  only  a  reasonable  and  mutual 
advantage,  but  the  act  of  a  stronger  against 
[181] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

a  weaker  party,  done  wholly  for  the  ad- 
vantage of  the  former  and  forced  upon  the 
reluctant  and  unreal  consent  of  the  latter  by 
an  unscrupulous  use  of  conscription  and  so- 
cial pressure.  The  Irish  have  waged  a  con- 
tinuous fight  for  freedom  punctuated  only 
by  the  truces  of  famine  and  exhaustion.  It 
is  obvious  to  everyone,  much  as  we  may  de- 
plore it,  aye,  even  though  we  condemn  it, 
that  so  long  as  there  is  an  Irishman  left  the 
Irish  will  wage  war  against  those  who  oc- 
cupy but  cannot  subdue  Ireland.  There 
can  be  no  peace  of  justice  so  long  as  Ireland 
continues  to  be  held  in  bondage,  for  just 
so  long  there  will  be  no  peace  on  the  Irish 
front  in  the  war  for  the  freedom  of  small 
nationalities. 

And  lacking  that  peace  in  Ireland,  what 
assurances  have  we  that  any  future  agree- 
ments into  which  we  may  enter  with  our 
associates  of  the  late  war  will  be  fulfilled? 

[182] 


Ireland's  Right  to  Freedom 

We  are  now  asked  to  be  party  to  a  covenant 
of  a  League  of  Nations.  All  mankind  is  in 
favor  of  the  League  of  Nations,  not  this  or 
that  league,  but  the  league,  the  league 
which  the  President  outlined  for  us  before 
and  during  the  war.  A  league  is  now  pro- 
posed which  leaves  us  largely  at  the  mercy 
of  the  rest  of  the  world,  and  into  it  we  are 
asked  to  go  with  an  England  that  holds  Ire- 
land in  subjection.  Can  we  trust  our  coun- 
try in  such  a  league?  Measured  by  the  case 
of  Ireland,  are  we  entering  into  a  compact 
with  a  power  incapable  of  covenant?  What 
would  that  compact  mean  to  us?  As  a  war 
measure  we  temporarily  surrendered  our 
sovereignty  to  the  extent  of  pooling  our  re- 
sources ;  to  secure  universal  peace  it  is  sug- 
gested that  we  make  sacrifices  of  power  and 
pride  and  of  our  traditional  isolation.  It 
is  conceivable  that  such  sacrifices  we  might 
make,  but  if  so  we  must  know  that  in  terms 
[  183  ] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

of  democracy  we  are  on  an  equality  with 
our  co-contractors.  Otherwise,  is  it  not  the 
better  policy  for  us  to  withdraw  now  from 
European  affairs  and  await  the  day  when 
freemen  here  may  safely  covenant  with  free- 
men there? 

Not  only  can  there  be  no  lasting  peace  of 
justice  with  Ireland  in  subjection,  con- 
stantly striving  to  vindicate  her  right  of  self- 
determination,  but  there  can  be  no  such 
compact  of  a  League  of  Nations  as  is  pro- 
posed so  long  as  that  condition  continues, 
for  it  is  inconceivable  that  the  United  States 
will  become  party  to  a  covenant  prepared 
and  presented  by  Great  Britain  that  will 
guarantee  the  permanent  subjection  of  Ire- 
land, and  this  is  what  the  proposed  covenant 
will  accomplish  if  it  is  accepted  anterior  to 
the  settlement  of  the  Irish  situation. 

Article  8  of  the  covenant  declares  that — 
"The  high  contracting  parties  recognize 
[184] 


Ireland's  Right  to  Freedom 

the  principle  that  the  maintenance  of  peace 
will  require  the  reduction  of  national  arma- 
ments to  the  lowest  point  consistent  with  na- 
tional safety,  etc." 

The  national  safety  of  the  United  King- 
dom, if  we  consider  Ireland  as  an  integral 
part  thereof,  involves  the  occupation  of  Ire- 
land at  the  present  moment  with  a  British 
army  of  200,000  men  equipped  with  tanks, 
aeroplanes,  artillery,  machine  guns,  and  all 
other  modern  implements  of  slaughter. 
This  200,000  means  an  armed  soldier  to 
every  20  of  the  population  of  Ireland,  a 
ratio  that  may  need  to  be  increased  or  de- 
creased. Therefore,  so  long  as  England 
holds  Ireland  in  subjection,  England  will 
require  from  the  executive  council  of  the 
League  permission  for  a  vast  army  to  be 
used  as  an  army  of  occupation  in  Ireland. 
Can  American  representatives  grant  that 
permission?  Are  we  not  in  effect  even 
[185] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

called  upon,  under  this  covenant,  to  help 
subdue  Ireland?  And  if — an  unthinkable 
contingency — such  permission  were  granted 
by  our  representatives,  would  we  not  for 
our  own  safety's  sake  require  a  pro  rata  in- 
crease in  the  American  army?  Would  we 
not  need  to  burden  ourselves  with  the  cost 
of  an  additional  army  of  200,000  men  to 
equalize  ours  with  the  military  strength  of 
England  in  Ireland  alone?  And  what  is 
true  for  the  military  forces  is  equally  true 
and  demonstrable  as  regards  the  naval 
forces. 

Therefore,  from  every  standpoint,  since 
the  status  of  Ireland  constitutes  an  excep- 
tion to  the  principles  for  which  we  fought 
the  war,  conflicts  with  our  attempts  to  pro- 
cure peace  and  adds  to  us  an  unnecessary 
burden  for  armaments,  it  can  not  be  prop- 
erly characterized  as  a  domestic  question 
affecting  England  alone. 
[186] 


Ireland's  Right  to  Freedom 

Moreover,  the  basis  of  the  whole  theory, 
the  very  assumption  of  the  covenant  of  the 
League  of  Nations,  is  that  the  status  of 
every  nation  must  be  determined  by  all  for 
all  time;  and  the  covenant  is  an  English 
proposal.  England  suffers  from  no  mis- 
apprehension on  the  subject.  She  explicitly 
demands  that  the  integrity  of  the  United 
Kingdom  be  guaranteed  by  the  League,  for 
she  asks  in  Clause  X  of  the  covenant  (which 
Jan  Smuts  prepared  and  Lord  Robert  Cecil 
presented)  that — 

"The  high  contracting  parties  shall  under- 
take to  respect  and  preserve  as  against  ex- 
ternal aggression  the  territorial  integrity 
and  existing  political  independence  of  all 
States  members  of  the  League.  In  case  of 
any  such  aggression  or  in  case  of  any  threat 
or  danger  of  such  aggression  the  executive 
council  shall  advise  upon  the  means  by 
which  the  obligation  shall  be  fulfilled." 
[187] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

Let  us  contemplate  for  a  moment  the 
effect  of  this  provision.    Clauses  8,  9  and  18 
seek  to  regulate  the  private  production  of 
armaments;  therefore,  subject  States  will 
henceforth  be  kept  unarmed  by  the  common 
action  of  all  parties  to  the  League.    Clause 
X  forbids  such  help  as  France  gave  us  in 
1779.     America,  in  being  asked  to  insure 
the  effective  disarmament  of   Ireland,  to 
join  in  guaranteeing  the  territorial  integrity 
of  the  high  contracting  parties,   and,   on 
occasion,  to  assist  in  defending  that  terri- 
torial integrity,  is  of  necessity  invited  first 
to  examine  what  she  is  to  insure  and  to  guar- 
antee and  to  defend.     She  is  obviously  ex- 
amining the  territorial  integrity  of   Italy 
before  guaranteeing  it;  and  she  seems  to  be 
examining  also  the  extensile  boundaries  of 
Japan  before  guaranteeing  them.    America 
cannot  enter  into  this  compact  without  in- 
viting  inspection    of   her   own   territorial 
[188] 


Ireland's  Right  to  Freedom 

possessions,  nor  can  America  enter  into  this 
compact  without  subjecting  to  inspection 
the  territorial  possessions  of  her  associates. 

As  this  is  St.  Patrick's  night  we  limit  our- 
selves to  the  consideration  of  such  conse- 
quences of  the  proposed  covenant  of  the 
League  of  Nations  as  implicate  America  in 
Irish  affairs.  The  invitation  extended  to  us 
in  Clause  X  to  examine  the  territorial  in- 
tegrity of  Great  Britain,  that  we  are  asked 
to  guarantee,  invites  us  this  evening  to  con- 
sider Britain's  claim  to  the  territory  of  Ire- 
land ;  and  a  decision  on  that  claim  must  be 
made  before  we  can  accept  the  clause. 

The  very  assertion  of  that  claim  requires 
England,  even  as  we  speak,  to  hold  Ireland 
by  means  of  an  army  of  occupation,  to  ad- 
minister Ireland  through  a  military  gov- 
ernor, and  to  govern  Ireland  by  that  suspen- 
sion of  law  and  justice  which  is  called 
martial  law.  It  requires,  in  other  words, 
[189] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

the  existence  of  a  state  of  war;  and  the  pur- 
pose of  the  covenant  of  the  League  of  Na- 
tions is  peace.  The  assertion  of  that  claim 
requires  the  negation  of  every  principle  for 
which  we  have  fought,  and  especially  of  the 
principle  which  we  have  been  told  will 
alone  insure  peace,  "the  unequivocal  prin- 
ciple that  the  interest  of  the  weakest  is  as 
sacred  as  the  interest  of  the  strongest." 

The  assertion  of  that  claim,  moreover,  is 
made  in  face  of  the  fact  that  Ireland  has 
achieved  the  most  remarkable  democratic 
victory  of  the  war,  for  in  spite  of  the  army 
of  occupation,  in  spite  of  an  alien  electoral 
system,  under  the  very  franchise  imposed 
by  England,  and  in  conformity  with  the 
rules  and  the  decree  of  her  Imperial  oppres- 
sor, Ireland  has  held  an  election  on  one 
issue,  and  only  one,  the  issue  of  separation 
from  England.  Sir  Horace  Plunkett  has 
stated  (New  York  World,  March  16,  1919) 
that: 

[190] 


Ireland's  Right  to  Freedom 

"Adherents  of  the  program  for  absolute 
independence  point  with  reason  to  the  De- 
cember elections  as  indicating  the  temper 
of  the  people  most  affected.  There  was  ab- 
solutely no  ambiguity  about  the  issues  on 
which  the  candidates  in  those  elections  went 
to  the  polls.  They  stated  quite  clearly  to 
the  electors  who  voted  for  them  that  they 
would  pledge  themselves  to  a  severance  of 
relations  with  England,  first  by  abstention 
from  Parliament  and  thereafter  by  the 
establishment  of  an  independent  republic." 

Of  the  candidates  for  the  suffrage  of  the 
Irish  people,  over  two-thirds  of  the  elected 
were  separatists.  After  the  election,  such 
of  Ireland's  elected  representatives  as  were 
not  in  jail  or  in  exile  met  in  Dublin  as  a 
National  Assembly,  declared  her  inde- 
pendence, proclaimed  an  Irish  Republic, 
and  openly  appealed  to  the  free  peoples  of 
the  world  for  recognition  of  that  Republic. 

[191] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

In  face  of  this  exhibition  and  exercise  of 
national  function,  in  face  of  the  united  na- 
tion of  Ireland  speaking  through  a  govern- 
ment of  the  elected  representatives  of  Ire- 
land, can  America  guarantee  to  England 
perpetual  or  even  momentary  possession  of 
the  territory  of  Ireland? 

The  international  status  of  the  Irish  Re- 
public now  requires  the  most  scrupulous  ex- 
amination at  our  hands.  Ireland  claims 
she  is  de  jure,  no  longer  a  part  of  the  Brit- 
ish Empire,  that  she,  in  the  election  of  De- 
cember 14,  1918,  peacefully  exercised  her 
right  to  determine  her  political  destiny. 

Having  been  so  long  "Under  the  con- 
tinued impulse  of  American  and  English 
tutelage  by  which  all  nations  are  declared 
to  have  the  inalienable  right  to  determine 
their  own  form  of  government,"  she  now  re- 
minds her  teachers  and  all  the  rest  of  the 
world  that  self-determination  is  an  imme- 
[192] 


Ireland's  Right  to  Freedom 

morial  right  of  freemen ;  that  in  the  past,  re- 
sistance to  invasion  and  revolt  against  con- 
quest were  instinctive  to  Irishmen  as  to  all 
freemen  menaced  in,  or  deprived  of,  their 
freedom;  that  Irishmen  have  continuously 
exercised  this  right  of  self-determination 
from  England's  first  aggression  down  to  the 
present  day,  although  hitherto  without  suc- 
cess and  at  the  forfeit  of  their  lives;  that 
in  consequence  of  victory  in  this  war  to  end 
war,  this  war  to  make  the  world  safe  for 
democracy,  to  put  right  above  might,  deter- 
mination by  ballot  has  replaced  determina- 
tion by  bayonet  or  bullet,  and  that  self-de- 
termination of  nations  in  the  new  world 
order  is  to  be  achieved  by  vote,  not  by  vio- 
lence. The  Irish  point  out  that,  in  1905, 
long  before  the  war,  Norway  thus  peace- 
fully separated  from  Sweden;  that  in  1918, 
during  the  war,  Iceland  in  like  manner 
separated  from  Denmark;  that  after  the 
[  193  ] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

armistice  the  representatives  of  the  North 
Slesvigers,  who  had  been  elected  on  a  Ger- 
man franchise  to  the  German  Reichstag, 
met  under  the  leadership  of  Erik  Hanssen 
and  unanimously  decided  in  the  name  of 
the  people  of  North  Slesvig,  and  in  accord- 
ance with  the  doctrines  of  self-determina- 
tion proclaimed  by  President  Wilson, 
peacefully  to  separate  from  the  German 
empire;  that  Hanssen  first  communicated 
this  decision  to  the  Foreign  Minister  of  the 
German  Republic,  who  acquiesced  in  it,  as 
he  stated,  "in  accordance  with  President 
Wilson's  doctrine  of  self-determination," 
and  then  communicated  it  to  the  Danish 
Government  together  with  a  request  that 
North  Slesvig  should  be  incorporated  in 
the  Kingdom  of  Denmark,  seeking  at  the 
same  time  Denmark's  mediation  at  the 
Peace  Conference;  that  already  President 
Wilson  and  other  delegates  hare  expressed 
[194] 


Ireland's  Right  to  Freedom 

their  approval  of  the  course  taken  by  North 
Slesvig,  but  that  thus  far  no  sign  of  approval 
from  a  mediating  government  has  been 
vouchsafed  to  the  Republic  which  Ireland 
has  peacefully  established  in  accordance 
with  the  doctrine  of  self-determination 
which  we  steadfastly  proclaimed  as  our 
slogan  throughout  the  war. 

The  Republic  of  Ireland  has  by  procla- 
mation sought  recognition  from  the  "free 
peoples  of  the  world,"  but  so  far  has  sought 
in  vain.  Without  such  recognition,  Ireland 
under  the  old  law  is  still  an  integral  part  of 
the  territory  of  the  British  Empire.  We 
are  asked  to  guarantee  the  territorial  integ- 
rity of  that  Empire,  to  pledge  to  maintain 
England  in  perpetual  possession  of  Ireland. 
That  possession,  it  should  be  pointed  out  in 
passing,  implies  one  law  for  the  conqueror, 
another  for  the  conquered.  It  implies  re- 
ward for  imperial  rebels,  condonation  of 
[195] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

the  treason  which  led  Carson  and  his  ac- 
complices to  flout  the  sovereignty  of  the 
Empire,  to  nullify  a  statute  of  Great  Brit- 
ain, to  invite  the  aid  of  the  German  Kaiser 
and  thereby  to  precipitate  the  Great  World 
War.  It  implies  the  massacre  of  Batchelor 
Walk  for  the  Irish,  promotion  to  the  Cab- 
inet for  the  traitorous  Carsonites.  It  im- 
plies the  utter  futility  of  all  peaceful  and 
constitutional  methods  of  agitation  for  Irish 
freedom.  It  implies  periodic  recurrence  of 
the  forlorn  hopes  of  1798,  of  1803,  of  1848, 
of  1867,  of  1916;  of  the  valiant  efforts  of  the 
unconquerable  Irish  with  their  naked  hands 
to  wrest  from  their  armed  masters  the  free- 
dom that  is  dearer  than  life. 

We  are  asked  to  be  a  party  to  the  destruc- 
tion of  the  newborn  Republic  of  Ireland,  a 
Republic  modeled  in  the  image  and  like- 
ness of  our  own,  inspired  by  our  own  free 
spirit,  instituted  by  men  of  our  own  blood, 
[196  J 


Ireland's  Right  to  Freedom 

and  fashioned  upon  the  principles  that  were 
triumphantly  vindicated  for  the  rest  of 
Europe  by  our  own  soldiers. 

We  gave  recognition  to  the  Czecho-Slo- 
vaks  when  they  were  an  army  of  50,000  ex- 
Russian  prisoners  of  war  in  the  depths  of 
Siberia  fighting  against  those  who  freed 
them.  We  gave  them  $8,000,000  to  sustain 
them,  and  it  would  appear  that  we  are  only 
at  the  beginning  of  our  giving.  What  do 
we  owe  to  the  Czecho-Slovaks  that  we  do 
not  owe  a  millionfold  to  the  Irish?  We 
have  insisted  upon  the  presence  at  the  Peace 
Conference  of  three  reprsentativs  from  Bra- 
zil, whose  contribution  to  world  freedom  yet 
remains  to  be  paid,  but  we  have  not  insisted 
upon  the  presence  at  the  Peace  Conference 
of  a  single  representative  of  the  Irish,  we, 
the  beneficiaries  of  140  years  of  Irish  sacri- 
fice for  democracy,  the  beneficiaries  of  500,- 
000  Irish  born  who  fought  in  this  war,  the 
[197] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

beneficiaries  of  that  race  that  under  the 
Selective  Service  System  had  a  greater  per- 
centage in  Class  I  and  a  smaller  percentage 
in  deferred  classes  than  any  alien  race  in  the 
United  States. 

What  does  our  attitude  towards  Ireland 
mean?  Unless  it  means  national  apostasy 
of  every  principle  to  which  during  the  war 
we  dedicated  ourselves  and  our  fortunes, 
an  unequivocal  expression  from  us  on  the 
Irish  question  is  long  overdue.  We  can 
never  maintain  our  national  self-respect,  if 
by  conduct  or  silence  we  imply  that  there 
is  to  be  one  law  for  Poland  and  the  other 
small  nations  lately  subject  to  Germany, 
and  another  for  Ireland  subject  to  England. 
We  can  never  even  contemplate  a  tacit  ac- 
ceptance of  Ireland  as  the  only  subject  na- 
tion in  Europe.  It  is  unthinkable  to  us,  as 
Americans,  that  America,  the  mother  of 
republics,  will  be  party  to  the  crime  of 
[198] 


Ireland's  Right  to  Freedom^ 

strangling  at  its  birth  the  latest  and  mosf 
promising  of  her  offspring.  Inaction  on 
our  part  at  this  time  is  scarcely  less  repre- 
hensible than  overt  attack  upon  Irish  free- 
dom. Ere  our  delegates  become  party  to 
pacts  which  may  consign  Ireland  to  per- 
petual bondage,  the  least  we  can  and  must 
do  is  to  demand  for  the  elected  representa- 
tives of  the  Irish  Republic  a  full  and  open 
hearing  of  their  case  at  the  Peace  Confer- 
ence. 

Such  demand  could  not  result  in  tfie  with- 
drawal of  England  from  the  Peace  Con- 
ference, for  certainly  England  protests  that 
a  solution  of  the  Irish  issue  is  the  one  thing 
that  she  most  fervently  desires,  British  labor 
has  declared  for  Irish  self-determination, 
and  contemporary  history  furnishes  the 
proof  that  the  solution  cannot  come  from 
England.  The  Irish  issue  must  be  solved. 
Where  can  a  more  correct  solution  be 
[199] 


The  Invincible  Irish 

reached  than  at  the  Peace  Conference? 
Who  with  greater  propriety  can  demand  its 
solution  than  the  people  of  the  United 
States?  What  more  successful  method  of 
effecting  its  solution  can  be  devised  than  a 
declaration  by  the  American  people  that 
until  the  status  of  Ireland  as  an  independent 
nation  is  established,  the  United  States  will 
never  become  party  to  a  covenant  that,  in 
view  of  the  present  status,  would  compel  us 
to  repair  and  refasten  beyond  the  possibility 
of  breaking  them  the  shackles  that  chain  a 
weak  nation  to  a  strong  one,  an  unwilling 
people  to  an  unrelenting  conqueror? 

We  who  combined  our  might  and  power 
with  the  cause  of  justice  for  men  of  every 
kind  everywhere  will  not  now  combine  that 
might  and  power  with  the  cause  of  injustice 
against  men  of  any  kind  anywhere. 

In  this  city,  on  the  night  of  March  4th, 
[200] 


Ireland's  Right  to  Freedom 

the  President  accurately  pictured  the  trag- 
edy that  failure  would  mean. 

If  men,"  said  he,  "cannot  now, 
after  this  agony  of  bloody  sweat,  come  to 
their  self-possession  and  see  how  to  regulate 
the  affairs  of  the  world,  we  will  sink  back 
into  a  period  of  struggle  in  which  there  will 
be  no  hope,  and  therefore  no  mercy.    There 
can  be  no  mercy  where  there  is  no  hope,  for 
why  should  you  spare  another  if  you  your- 
self expect  to  perish?    Why  should  you  be 
pitiful  if  you  can  get  no  pity?    Why  should 
you  be  just  if,  upon  every  hand,  you  are  put 
upon?" 

Let  us  ere  it  be  too  late,  animated  solely 
by  justice  to  ourselves,  by  justice  to  Ireland, 
by  justice  to  England,  by  justice  to  the 
world,  make  the  demand  that  Ireland  must 
be  heard,  thereby  proving  that  we  are  "true 
Americans,  lovers  of  liberty  and  of  the 
right." 

[201] 


Date  Due 

(Clte^r*-} 

ATV     1  8 

iqqq 

MrM      '  v 

\sJJ\J 

<f) 

BOSTON  COLLEGE 


3  9031   01646354  9 


239753 


UJcJU~X  $.  c  • 


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